Volunteering

I'm in the fourth floor of Seattle's Pacific Place, one of those shiny, breezy "urban lifestyle" malls that have sprung up in American cities in the past ten years. Every city seems to have one - Spokane has its infamous RiverPark Square, Portland has Pioneer Place, and even San Francisco has the eponymous San Francisco Shopping Center, complete with a Nordstrom store! These malls are kind of unreal spaces and slightly bizarre. You can't do any functional shopping here, but you can do destination shopping. The hardware store has no real hardware, the restaurants are for a special occasion, and everything is slightly inconvenient, in a weird way.

Why am I in this weird no-space? Well, I'm volunteering for the Seattle International Film Festival, and this requires that I sit at a computer, doing not much of anything for most of the afternoon. Occasionally, someone asks me how much the festival guide is (free), if there are half-price tickets on sale (no, that's the Ticket Window booth to your right) and lots of people walk past, staring at the posters for such upcoming classics as Resident Evil: Extinction, 1408 and The Guardian's Son. Right now, some guy is staring at the Residient Evil: Extinction poster, hollering "Oh my God! I want to kill myself!"

It's kinda entertaining. A minute ago, a gaggle (yes, a gaggle) of kids came running out of an elevator toward the theatre box office and one of them tripped and fell, hard, against the floor. The suburban parents following the gaggle just sort of smiled and laughed as the kid limped away, apparently not seriously damaged.

One of the upsides to volunteering at SIFF is that you get lots of free passes to see movies, which is pretty handy. I like to see movies and not only do you often get to see the films playing during your shift, you get one voucher for every two hours you volunteer. And volunteering at SIFF is way easy.

Plus, the craziest people volunteer. Every time I volunteer, there's someone weird, who, naturally, gravitates toward me. Of course. I'm a weird magnet (being odd myself...). A couple days ago, at the venerable Harvard Exit theatre, this lady started questioning me on why I wasn't interested in watching the three-hour abortion documentary Red Without Blue. As if it's not obvious. So without going into the whole "I'm a gay man and I don't passionately care about women's issues" schtick, I just kind of shrugged my shoulders.

This simply wouldn't do, apparently. This woman seemed to want to debate abortion with whomever didn't share her viewpoint. I started to wonder if she picked me out to debate with because I'm male and might possibly give her a reason for her soapbox. I didn't bite.

Although, she did get huffy when I talked about "young girls" who have to trek to New York to have an abortion performed, because there are no providers in their local area and for some reason or another, it's easier for them to go to NYC. She took umbrage that I used the term "girls", seemingly implying that I was being disrespectful because I didn't call them "young women", although I think it's still perfectly okay to refer to someone who is underage as a girl or a boy. Like most self righteous people, she wasn't about to see nuance or change her mind.

Later, she provided some entertainment as we were cleaning up from a private event that was catered. One of the other volunteers remarked "yeah, they wouldn't want the food left out cannibalizing sales at the concession stand".

The weird lady perked up. "Cannibalizing?!? What does this have to do with eating human beings?"

I tried to explain that there was more than one meaning to that term, but she seemed to understand there was only one.

High drama indeed.