#134. Adrian’s Bougie Place (Friday, December 8, 2023)

What was your best day…of living the high life for one night?

At no point during this entire night could I have reasonably conceived of ending it at this title location; but, it turns out it was the only logical conclusion.

First, Adrian Williams. Recall he was the six-foot-seven Cambridge Economics PhD (and house league goalkeeper), Division III basketball player, and MVP of our department soccer championship this past summer (#90). He was also a close friend of mine, with whom I shared an almost effortless rapport¹, but this was mostly limited to the Friday researcher Happy Hours—the one time a week where he’d loosen up from his standing ultra-professional manner—where he, like me, was one of the regular attendees. He was also a regular dispenser of sage life advice, some of his notable Happy Hour wisdom drops to me being:

“You should probably wear basketball shoes when playing basketball.” (Following that #90 injury, where I suffered a Grade 2 ankle sprain from an awkward rebound landing while not wearing basketball shoes.)
“You probably shouldn’t use ChatGPT as a psychiatrist.” (Shortly after I discovered its wonders as an entity to actually provide reaction to my whole Best Days list without getting bored.)
“You probably shouldn’t ask a girl out twice.” (To be fair, I never actually did that—he misinterpreted something almost as stupid I told him I did. Though the point remains.)

Anyways, this night naturally starts off at Happy Hour, where the crowd is especially large. Kai Ho is there, along with Ryan “Gary” Petrovitch (#80) visiting from Lakehead, and the topic of excitement today is the status of free agent pitcher-slash-home run champion Shohei Ohtani’s plane—which some overly obsessed fans² had tracked a few hours earlier to be heading to Toronto, and that exploded across social media.

So that goes on for a loud two or three hours. And from there, Adrian, me, Gabrielle from our financial stability department, and her boyfriend Daniel³ randomly go this downtown ramen place. There, Adrian has the inspired idea to go crash the international department’s holiday party, which has just gotten started at this karaoke bar in Gatineau (i.e., the Quebec side of the river). So, without a second thought, we finish our delicious ramen and hop into an Uber and go.

And this one is indeed a party. There are probably sixty or seventy colleagues there, all from the economics departments (and about half of them I know reasonably well), and they all welcome us financial markets outsiders with excitement. Naturally, the night blends into several hours of continuous drinking and catching up with groups and groups of old and new friends, and of course… watching other people try to sing.

I wanted to sing, but only if I could sing my favorite song—Kylie Minogue’s Love at First Sight. I was already operating at a high baseline level of excitement this day, since I was actually going to see Kylie perform in Vegas in exactly one week (#14). But, for some reason, they did not have this song available. Which was probably for the best, as my butchering of it may have dampened the later special experience of seeing Kylie perform it as the finale at Voltaire.

Instead, I got a full show of Adrian singing. And for pretty much the entire three or four hours, he was singing. Jumping to the front and joining every second group is blaring out the lyrics for some modern pop song of classic tune that he loved. He was doing all this with a level of genuine excitement I had never seen from him since, and I thought to myself a few times (in my own drunk state), “how the hell does he have the energy?” Some of the research assistants there we know from basketball comment to me: “That guy is on a different planet right now.” And of course when his favorite song comes up, Zombie by The Cranberries⁴, things just go up several levels from there.

It goes without saying, but we stay to the very, very end, a few hours past midnight. But between all the singing and dancing and general chaos, Adrian has misplaced his coat. So as the others file out, I spend another ten or thirty minutes (I’ve lost track at this point) helping him look for it. By the time we’re done, he offers for me to stay in the guest room of his downtown condo for the night, since the trip back to Barrhaven (the outskirts where I live, and is a running joke every third or fourth Happy Hour) would be an hour and a sixty-dollar Uber charge from where we are.⁵

Well, it’s not just Adrian’s condo. It’s his “bougie place”. He must still be recovering from the electricity of Dolores O’Riordan singing Zombie, because he repeats that phrase at least four or five times. With Adrian insisting, and myself thinking it would be oddly cool to have a completely improptu “hotel night” (#132) in my own city a week before my Vegas-Kylie Minogue adventure, while becoming curious about seeing this “bougie place”, I accept and we call for an Uber there in the minus-25 cold.

And yes, the place is bougie. Majorly bougie. It’s literally a two-story house in an expansive space, with one of those open layouts with a spiraling staircase leading up to the balcony-like second floor (balcony-like only in terms of view; somehow, the floor space was just as big as that of my own townhouse). Except it’s two stories in a condo building twenty floors above the street.

As Adrian heads upstairs to recover from his wild karaoke night, I settle into the lower-floor guest room—-which is huge and very comfortable in its own right, with its own washroom attached—to take some much-needed recovery myself. Except here, in an unfamiliar room, in a property whose fanciness (sorry, bougieness) was at a level I could never have conceptualized, and most importantly… in my own hometown.

Vegas and Kylie Minogue could wait. In an odd way, this was nearly as epic. Nearly.

With him and Jason Simonsen (#60), seems to a pattern with me and seriously academic-minded former college athletes.
While Ohtani will make several notable appearances in other stories (#112, #80, #6), plus the big one from the other list, I was not one of those. I wasn’t even as excited as the “lesser” baseball fans (#129) at Happy Hour. I knew enough about team budget constraints player contribution to team wins to know that even he was not worth his $60 billion/year price tag.
Who worked for different public institution and I find out went to my high school a year below me, though I never met before that night.
Adrian was extremely proud of his Irish background. He actually took weekly Irish lessons at this one small bar in the city that was considered the only “legitimate” Irish pub.
I am of course not one for planning ahead. So I’ve happily absorbed that long commute and cost many times before and since, more often from very late nights at the nearby Lac Leamy casino, if it comes after an epic night.