Why did I not go to Lilith Fair when the festival was the hottest ticket on the planet?

Why did we never go to TIFF, the Toronto International Film Festival, when we lived in DOWNTOWN TORONTO?

Lots of big whys.

We lived downtown from 1993 to 1999 – double income, no kids, a social life, a working life. We liked movies, we liked concerts. Perhaps even back then, we weren’t such fans of crowds.

It is only now, looking back, that I realize that those were pretty iconic events.

TIFF is celebrating its 50th anniversary. With just the two of us during the week and more flexible schedules, we decided at the last minute to catch a matinee showing at TIFF Lightbox. It’s a beautiful building, and no crowds during the day.

It was such fun, a beautiful day, enjoying the city, sunny King street, people out and about, on patios, movie fans galore, no overwhelming gaggles of people.

We watched the feature “I Swear” – a wonderful film, Ian didn’t even need subtitles to decipher the Scottish accents (we laugh, it’s ironic, with his Scottish roots he sometimes finds movies with British/Scottish/Irish accents difficult to understand, while I have no such problems.)

We were hooked from the opening music, also in the trailer:

We noted that TIFF also premiered “Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery,” a documentary about the first all-women’s music festival started by Canadian icon Sarah McLachlan (hmm, Scottish roots too, I just realized) back in the late 1990s. It took the world by storm. I didn’t realize the sheer number of women involved in the whole production, behind the scenes, in front of the scenes. All the fantastic female artists involved, including Sinead O’Connor, Sheryl Crow, Tracy Chapman, the Indigo Girls, Jewel, Dido, Paula Cole, Liz Phair, Suzanne Vega, Natalie Merchant, Chrissie Hynde – so many of my favourites! It was so controversial at the time, but never meant to be. It makes me sad that some things are still the way they are, perhaps even worse in some ways for women these days.

We caught the film at home on CBC GEM just a couple of nights ago.

I guess we were too busy building our own mystery, hyper-focused on work, and from 1997-1999, the years of Lilith, we were focused on building our family.

So here we are 25 years later, we’ve done TIFF, we’ve seen what Lilith was about, and we have our babies.

No FOMO, it all works out.