Noah Cowan

At a film festival, amid the stars and the hype and lurid glare of over-sponsored glamour, you live in hope that you’ll stumble across something thrilling, inspiring and wildly original that comes right out of the blue. Last night I saw exactly that. It wasn’t a film. And it wasn’t even officially part of the Toronto International Film Festival. It was a party celebrating a Patti Smith documentary that, due to a mysterious lapse in taste, had been excluded from the festival. Generally I find there’s not enough time to attend parties during TIFF. And whenever I do, I always seem to be at the wrong party, then get anxious reading breathless reports in the newspaper about about all the fabulousness I missed at the star-studded In Style soireé. But last night I got lucky. Joe Fresh, the Loblaws designer, was hosting the party at the Gardiner Museum with a tie-in to a non-TIFF screening of Patti Smith: Dream of Life. I went because I heard that Patti Smith was going be there, but had no idea she would perform. And no matter how many close encounters of the celebrity kind I missed at TIFF, I now feel I can safely claim that I lucked into the best party of the festival.