Would you believe I was this close?

Today we came this close to getting four primo seats for the Calgary/Kings game. This close. And getting this close to tickets involved CBC and our wedding.

As many of you know, Daorcey and I are CBC fiends. When we were in Toronto, I was pretty happy to see CBC lockout graffiti still around and to watch a taping of the Rick Mercer Report. Today was CBC Calgary's Blitz Day to raise $500,000 for the Calgary Food Bank. All month they've been trying to raise money and I guess today everyone was shilling. CBC also promised station tours and snacks. Needless to say, we were excited to see where the magic happens.

Here's where our wedding came in. Many of our relatives, in lieu of gifts, decided to give us cash. We ended up with a fair bit of change and we wanted to donate some of it because it seemed like the right thing to do. Plus, it'll assauge my guilt when I buy some chic boots.

After work, we drove over to CBC and made our donation of $752.66. It included gifts to friends, family, the donation from the wedding money and the interest it earned. The food bank people looked pretty happy as they can stretch each dollar to four times its value. In return, we got a CBC tote bag, an XL fleece and a uber coffee mug. I was hoping we would get something cool as people who donated $100+ had been getting tickets or other things but nothing appeared. I wanted to say something but then I got all Canadian (Daorcey says: "or just plain appropriate").

While we waited for our tour to start, we munched on some Sunterra cookies which weren't very good. I had a feeling they were baked with lard and not love.

Our tour guide was with the communication department but he didn't know much about the building as it was his first time doing the tour. He showed us various rooms and what they did. No juicy gossip here. But there was some funny stuff. The radio department, which takes up the first floor, had a large metal festivus pole. I wonder, especially with the lockout, if there was much airing of grievances. We went to the makeup room where the stylist claimed the real magic happened and we ran into David Gray there. I know some people who, when they watch him on TV, get the feeling he's a bit of a jerk. But, we got to meet him in his natural habitat--the studio--and learned that that's not the case. To be fair, he was very accomodating to talk with us 15 minutes before he went to air nationally on Newsworld. He answered our questions about his computer, the teleprompters and the set. The TV studio is quite large and the set looks like they put in at least $200 more than the Rick Mercer set.

The last cool room was a green room which had autographs from the visitors over the years. I didn't really spot anyone super famous but I saw Liona Boyd's scrawl.

The tour came to a close and we were in the lobby when Jeff Collins approached me. He's the evening host for the drive home and they were doing the show in the lobby. I think I should preface the next part of the story by saying that Collins looks like a radio guy just by the clothes he wears--he looks too comfortable to be on TV. During a break, he came up to me and asked, "Were you here last year?" I said no and again he asked, "Are you sure?" to which I answered no. He mumbled something about A/V people not being very good with faces and scuttled away. I wasn't quite sure how to take it... was he hitting on me?

(Daorcey says: "good grief.")

Escaping as quickly as possible from horny radio hosts (maybe it was just me), we jump in the car and listen to the CBC. Collins mentions four tickets in the sixth row of the President's box for the game are only going for $500. We quickly run back inside with the hopes of applying our donation to the auction. But sadly, and not enough adverbs can describe how crushed our hopes were, the auction had closed at $600. As a consolation we got two t-shirts. I got the rainbow butterfly logo (CBC's second logo ever) and Daorcey got the exploding pizza on a tee-shirt.

But everything has an upside. That $600 that was bid on the tickets would not have been donated if we had used our donation as our own bid for the tickets--and we would have seen the Flames lose 5-2. And now I have a funny story about Jeff Collins.