#135. 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, as it turned out, it was the only logical conclusion.

First, Adrian Williams. Recall that Adrian was the six-foot-seven Cambridge Economics PhD, former Division III basketball player, and MVP of our department soccer championship that summer (#94). He was also a close friend with whom I shared an almost effortless rapport, mostly through the Friday researcher Happy Hours, where we were both regular attendees and he loosened up from his otherwise ultra-professional manner.

Anyways, this night naturally starts off at Happy Hour, where the topic of excitement today is the status of free agent superstar Shohei Ohtani’s (#122) plane—which some overly obsessed fans had tracked heading toward Toronto a few hours earlier, setting off a social media frenzy.

So that goes on for a loud two or three hours. And from there, we go to 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, he and I finish our 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, about half of whom I know reasonably well, and they welcome us financial markets outsiders with excitement. Naturally, the night blends into several hours of catching up with 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 unusually excited that 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 butchering it might have dampened the experience of seeing Kylie perform it herself as the Voltaire finale.

Instead, I got a full show of Adrian singing. He kept jumping to the front, joining every second group and belting out whatever modern pop song or classic tune he loved. He was doing all this with a level of genuine excitement I had never seen from him before, and I thought to myself a few times, how the hell does he have the energy? Some of the research assistants we knew from basketball commented to me: “That guy is on a different planet right now.” And when his favorite song, Zombie by The Cranberries, comes up, things go up several levels from there. (Adrian was extremely proud of his Irish background.)

It goes without saying, but we stay to the 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—a running Happy Hour joke because of how far out I lived—would mean an hour-long, sixty-dollar Uber.

Well, it’s not just Adrian’s condo. It’s his “bougie place”. He repeats that phrase at least four or five times. With Adrian insisting, I start thinking it would be oddly cool to have a completely impromptu “hotel night” in my own city a week before my Vegas-Kylie Minogue adventure. Curious about this “bougie place”, I accept.

It is, in fact, bougie: essentially a two-story home inside a downtown condo building, with a huge open layout and a staircase leading to a balcony-like second floor.

I settle into the comfortably large lower-floor guest room, with its own attached washroom, to settle in for the night—in an unfamiliar place whose fanciness (sorry, bougieness) I could barely have imagined. And, most importantly, in my own hometown.

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