Okay now I need to tell you about Friday evening. There's too much to share to save it all for tomorrow's Daily Lunch Update (DLU).
First thing, after work, was the "
MLK Labor Oscars," an event I never even knew existed. I assumed it must have been annual for some indeterminate period of time, but I asked someone at the event about this, and he said this was their first time holding the event since before covid. If we assume it always happens in the spring, then this would be its first time since 2019—a solid five years ago. How many times did they do it before then, I wonder?
Aha!
Facebook to the rescue! (Say what you will about Facebook, in times like this it's an invaluable resource.) It appears the "first ever Labor Oscars" was held in 2018. And, judging by the search results on MLK Labor's Facebook page, that was the only other one they've done.
Anyway, it's an event where MLK Labor gives out awards, Oscars-style, to the best organizations and individuals in labor activism over the past year. Shobhit likely knew nothing about the event in 2018, but snagged a ticket to this one because he is now on the
SAG-AFTRA Seattle Local board, and SAG-AFTRA was a
nominee for Best Strike. (Spoiler alert: they didn't win. Unfortunately, I can't remember who did.) I guess the organization was comped a certain number of tickets, which meant they could bring a "plus-one" as space allowed. I didn't really know for certain that I'd be able to go until Thursday, but Shobhit was very confident all along that he'd be able to bring me. He actually asked me to mark my calendar for it weeks ago, and then I totally spaced it when I booked my first SIFF movie ticket for the year. In the end, it worked out, just making for a busy Friday night: the MLK Labor event was at the new Seattle Convention Center Summit building on the fifth (top) floor, from 5 to 7:30 p.m. Then my movie was at SIFF Cinema at the Uptown at 8:30. It worked out perfectly.
Ry, whom Shobhit had run against in the Seattle City Council Primary election last year. was also there, and they brought a plus-one as well. Ry, it turns out, is also on the SAG-AFTRA Seattle Local board, which isn't all that surprising as Ry has their hands in many local entities, both political and entertainment-wise—like Shobhit, Ry also has an IMDb page. The event was billed as "formal to semi-formal" (I just wore black jeans with a black dress shirt, Shobhit incorrectly thought it would make people mistake me for a server; Shobhit wore
a black jacket over a white shirt and black bowtie), and Ry came wearing a gown.
I think there were seven or eight of us total as part of the SAG-AFTRA Seattle Local group. So far as I could tell, only two of us were plus-ones.
There was a reception with one free drink ticket per person and "heavy appetizers," only two of which were vegetarian options Shobhit and I could eat, but they were
both delicious: a "caprese salad" served in little compostable plastic cups, consisting only of tomatoes and cheese with toothpicks; and fried risotto balls. Shobhit and I both had countless of both of them. I couldn't even tell you how many. I must admit I was not super excited about this event, but when there is free food I am
there.
The reception was from 5:00 to 6:15, basically for snacking and schmoozing. I spent a fair amount of time just walking around getting new photos of the Convention Center, this being my first time back there for any event since Shobhit, Alexia and I all attended
the open house there in January last year. (No wait, I take it back! I was there last September with Lynn and Zephyr, for that
PAX West queer cosplay fashion show, but I didn't really take any photos of the building that time.) got that great shot at the top of this post through a window facing north not far from the room where the MLK Labor event was held. The building to the right, which for the life of me I cannot figure out online the name of (I'll have to look in person one of these days), was
still under construction during the Open House a year and a half ago.
Eventually I went to find a seat. When others decided to sit, and felt we should sit together, someone in our group noted that the first two rows were reserved for nominees, so we should all sit together in the second row. Then, the Executive Director of SAG-AFTRA Local noted that only two people were named as actual nominees, so maybe we weren't
all supposed to sit there. As a plus-one, I just went with the flow, but it did involve getting up from the first seat I had chosen, sitting in another one, and then having to get up and sit somewhere else again. In the end we all just sat in the third row.
The ceremony itself, which took up the last 45 minutes of the event, involved only the reading of nominees, announcing the winners, and them posing for a photo op. It was announced at the top of the show that there would not be time for speeches. Then, when Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell—having come directly from greeting President Biden for his arrival in Seattle that same evening—won the award for "Best Elected Official,"
he was granted the opportunity to speak. It was not lost on me that this was a local politician who had rushed to a relatively small-time event (there must have been 150 people there at best) to receive an award, and then give a speech that sounded honestly like something he could have said at a hundred other events. But, whatever, it's fine.
There was a couple of other individuals to win awards who got to speak briefly too, but most of them could only
pose for photos. When the event ended, the SAG-AFTRA Seattle Local group gathered for their own group photo.
I snapped my own shot, being one of three people taking a photo at the same time—this would kind of explain why people are looking in multiple different directions. For me, it was one of
28 shots I managed to get at the event.
Shobhit was going to walk me to my bus stop just to get some steps in—he had walked there from home and I walked from work, meeting there—but in the end he did not follow me as I kind of rushed out of there after that, walking from 9th over to 3rd, then catching a bus up to SIFF Cinema at the Uptown, for my first SIFF movie of the year.
In the past I have aimed to get in line an hour early at these things. Even this long post-pandemic, this clearly isn't yet necessary again. The showtime was at 8:30 and I got there at 8:00, standing maybe 20th in line among the ticket holders. I was rather struck by how few people were there yet. The theater even seemed relatively empty when they let us inside shortly after that. However, by the time 8:30 actually rolled around, the theater—one of the two smaller ones—was actually pretty packed. Not quite sold out, but I'd say at least 90% full.
The movie I saw was called
The Queen of My Dreams, about a queer Canadian woman with Pakistani immigrant parents who has to travel to Pakistan for her father's burial. I found the writing to be somewhat inconsistent and muddled, but I still enjoyed it.
When the movie ended, I had to wait maybe ten minutes before a #8 bus came along, and then I bussed home. There had been a Q&A with the director and producer after the movie, so even though it was only 97 minutes (honestly, fun as it was, it felt longer), I didn't get out of there until at least 10:30, maybe even closer to 10:45—because it was 11:20 by the time I managed to get back to my building and go straight to the rooftop terrace.
I knew there was the potential to see northern lights on Friday, but had only vaguely paid attention to that, not being convinced I'd be able to see much from Seattle, where there's the most light pollution. But, at 11:18 Gabriel texted one of the group chats,
Look up into the sky!!! So, I went ahead and went straight up to the roof in the elevator.
It took some time to see with the naked eye, but after a few minutes, you could see it. I texted Shobhit and within a few minutes he came up too. The most amazing thing to me was how I could take photos of the sky with my phone, and the aurora borealis would come out far clearer and more colorful there than it did when just looking at it.
I actually got a
10 shot photo album out of it, just shots of the aurora from different angles and directions, most of them very cool. When I first went up, one couple came out onto the larger Sun Terrace with me, looked up for like two minutes, then went back inside. when Shobhit came up, he had gone to the Garden Terrace on the other side of the building first, so I went over there—there aren't as many light lamps on the wall over there, so it was darker and the sky actually easier to see.
We went back and forth between the two terraces a couple of times. when I took Shobhit back over to the Sun Terrace again, this time there was a group of about six guys out there. We started seeing people coming out on the roof of the West Building as well. (In the end, everyone and their mother from across the country was posting photos of the Northern Lights to Facebook—but, I loved them all.) We told these guys about how it looked better on the other side, so we all went back again. One guy even draped a jacket over the one wall lamp to make it darker, which did help. Still, no matter what, the lights looked far more vivid and colorful in photos on our phones. Shobhit tried to take some with his phone but he has a model that's too old for good nighttime shots, and could not figure out a longer-exposure mode.
It was a kind of strange experience, only barely being able to make anything out with the naked eye but getting these awesome photos. Well, whatever: I got the great photos!
So that was how I had three notable events on Friday night: the MLK Oscars; the movie; the northern lights. I keep thinking about when I was a teenager and exchanging questions and answers with the woman who ran the B-52's fan club out of Manhattan in the early nineties. I took to trying to get to know her personally, outside of just B-52's related stuff, and once asked her to ask me some questions. One of them was, "Have you ever seen the northern lights?" When I was 14 or 15, I had no idea what that even was. I wish I could write to that lady now and tell her I've seen them.
For a long time I thought you could only see them if you were literally far north. Turns out, sometimes you can indeed see them from here—even from the city! (People in more remote areas, of course, got far better views and better photos, including Jessica, Laney's daughter, from Port Angeles.) Even filtered through my phone it was pretty extraordinary.
[posted 9:35 am]
