Highlights of Speaker's Corner

City TV has this thing here called Speaker's Corner. There are a couple of filming booths located in downtown Vancouver, where you can go and stick a dollar in and get something like 30 seconds on camera. One is in a shopping mall, one on the street and one somewhere else. They have a segment every day where they play back the messages that they have recorded, and most of them are just people being geeky or young kids mouthing off about shopping or dating. But today there was a funny one, and a not so funny one.

Segment number one: drunken English guy on the street at some obscene hour of the morning. "I just want to say to all those guys out there who have girlfriends who are smart, attractive, cool, really wonderful - hang onto them. Don't sit on the fence and wait for something to happen, get out there and tell them how you feel. Otherwise you might find yourself alone and pissed, talking to a camera on the street at 2am, which would be bloody ridiculous."

Segment number two: a youngish guy, again on the street in the middle of the night, obviously homeless. "I just wanted to come on this and tell my daughter, who I haven't seen for four years, how much I love her and think about her. I want you to know that I've never stopped thinking about you, and that your daddy's going through a rough patch right now, but that someday, I will be back in your life. So Naomi, I love you and I promise to see you soon."

And that really got to me, that this guy who probably doesn't have ten bucks in the world, actually put a dollar into a camera in the middle of the night to record a message for his daughter, because he didn't have anyone else to tell. It certainly made me think about things.