Friendship - via ABBA

At the conclusion of this month, my life will be taking a big step in a new direction that I never would have fathomed ten years ago when I was connecting to the Internet for the very first time. A fellow ABBAMAILer is moving out to San Diego and at least for a temporary basis, we've decided to share an apartment to help acclimate her to the area and get settled in all while having a friend available to help make the process a little smoother. This upcoming change has made me think about what moving and the unique set of circumstances that have occurred in my life to make this new direction come about.

Packing up and moving to a new city is never an easy process. You are stepping blindly into a situation where there are too many unexpected variables that you can't have a plan for before you arrive in that new city. At best, you'd have a tourist level of knowledge of that city. You blindly pick an area to live in without really knowing how compatible that area is with your lifestyle and career. You don't know the how people there will perceive you and how your experiences elsewhere will help you fit in with the people in your new city. You aren't familiar with traffic patterns of the city and often you move to these new cities alone with family members. Moving to a new city can be pretty stressful and the more that is unknown, the more the first few months will be test of character and your ability to adapt to your new surroundings.

For my friend, the odds are stacked a little more in her favor in that she'll have someone with over eighteen years of time in San Diego to help welcome her to the west coast of the United States. She won't be blindly stepping into a new environment; she'll have access to a wealth of information that would be best described as what the locals know that tourists don't often learn about that would otherwise take years to accumulate on her own. And I'm actually quite excited about the prospect of being able to share a lot of this information as she begins to make San Diego her home.

When I look back at the development of our friendship, I am just amazed by how it all developed. We first met in person at the Mamma Mia! premiere in Chicago in May 2001 and we met up as part of a larger group of ABBAMAILers attending the premiere. It was my second time venturing out on one of these treks across the US to meet up with ABBAMAILers and we ended up seated together at the bar following the premiere when our group went for drinks after the show. I don't think either of us expected to be more than just acquaintances we'd see from time to time at premieres and other ABBA events at that point in time but we exchanged contact information and kept in touch a couple of times by phone and e-mail.

We met up again at the New York premiere of Mamma Mia! in October of 2001 and while we were part of a much larger group, we met up the day following the premiere to tour the former site of the World Trade Centre towers, which has been dubbed Ground Zero. There weren't a lot of fans interested in going, or a lot of those that were had already done so on another day, so we went together, along with another fan. We ended up doing a couple other activities together while in New York and this time we stayed more in touch following that premiere.

By June of 2002 we were in constant contact with each other as friends along with another friend in Texas and we could easily have been described as the Three Musketeers and we decided to try having a non-Mamma Mia related gathering of fans and we selected Las Vegas as the city, hoping that several others would think Las Vegas would be enough of a draw on its own without any ABBA related activities to draw some fans out for a fun weekend together. Well aside from our Three Musketeers group, we only got one other person interested in joining us and we even got in touch with a former ABBAMAILer who had relocated to Las Vegas and despite only being five people total, we still had a great time. Who knew we'd be back again in Las Vegas with a much bigger group in February 2003 when Mamma Mia! would premiere a second permanently based production in the US at the Mandalay Bay resort?

In any case, my friend decided in late 2002 that she wanted to move to San Diego and hoped that by October 2003 she'd be in San Diego. October 2003 came and went but the desire for her to move to San Diego only intensified. The hold up was attributed to the delays in her application process for permanent resident status with the United States. As a citizen of the Netherlands, her status in the United States was tied to work visas with her job. She had begun the process of applying for permanent resident status long before the September 11th disaster but the disaster took the already slow process and slowed it down even further. By fall 2003, she had received approved status on her application and officially commenced plans towards her move to San Diego.

What I find amazing is that this friendship was initiated through a mutual love for ABBA. But not just ABBA, a number of other variables had to be in play as well. Without the generosity of a friend in Chicago who allowed me to stay with him for the Chicago premiere, I wouldn't have gone to that. I probably wouldn't have considered going to Chicago if I hadn't have attended the San Francisco premiere several months earlier when I was extremely nervous about meeting other ABBA fans for the first time. And without ABBAMAIL I certainly wouldn't have known about any of the premieres or the opportunities to meet up with other fans. So I can easily say that I am truly amazed that all these variables have come into play and that my new roommate at the end of this month will be a person I could have easily have never met at all.

While I suppose in this day and age of electronic communication that has opened the opportunity for people to get to know each other in all the corners of the world as easily as you could get to know someone within walking distance of your home, it's becoming more and more common for people who would otherwise never have known each other to become close friends, it's not as if its an entirely uncommon thing. Even looking back at my own family tree, my great grandparents on my mother's side of the family are a prime example. My great grandfather was an Italian who came over to North America from Italy on a boat in the early 1900s and my great grandmother was an American from Montana.

Even though my great grandmother died before my age reached double digits and my great grandfather lived until I was in my late teenage years, they both had been in my life and I feel lucky to have the chance to know another generation of my family that most others do not have the chance to meet. I even remember attending the 50th anniversary of their wedding shortly before my great grandmother passed away. But it never occurred to me in those several years between when my great grandmother passed away and when my great grandfather did to ask my great grandfather how he had met my great grandmother. How did a young man from Italy come over to the Americas starting somewhere on the East coast find a young woman from Montana, and how on earth did they decide to settle and have kids in a tiny mining town of British Columbia, Canada? I guess it's one of those mysteries that I'll never know the answer to because even my grandfather regrets not asking how his parents met.

So as a Canadian about to share an apartment with a Dutch woman, both us far from where we were respectively born, and having met through a unique set of circumstances, I can't help but think about my great grandparents what possible unique set of circumstances they had to undergo to be in the right place at the right time when they met without the aid of e-mail, mailing lists such as ABBAMAIL, and Mamma Mia! premieres to bring them together. While the times and means of communication may be worlds apart, it still amazes me how people build friendships and relationships from all the unique set of circumstances that occur in one's lifetime. Take a moment to appreciate the unique set of circumstances that have brought the people who are most significant to you into your life. And perhaps even look at those of your family and see how much your own life is a result of a unique set of circumstances.

Ryan Cameron

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