Pics From When I Met Michael Nus, Casie Stewart, & Other Awesome Folks At #KloutTO

My friend @MichaelNus recently wrote a post on his blog called “The Day I Met Chris Brooker.” The post, which I’m given to understand will be one of a series, is a great post by a superb gentleman about @cbrooker, someone whom I cannot begin to express enough praise. Chris Brooker is a really special human and I am privileged to know him. Nus’ post brought to mind the day I met a bunch of different people involved in social media and tech in Toronto (I refuse to call it the “Social Media Scene” or the “Twitterati”) and then somehow it got brought to mind last night by a complete different person in a completely unrelated manner.

It all started when Sandy aka @sassygirlcanada tweeted this:

I was just thinking about the first people I met #IRL from twitter!! Can you remember the first people you met in person? 🙂

— SandyT (@sassygirlcanada) February 7, 2013

Which led to my friend Raymond Motee aka @FunkyBarrister replying with this:

@sassygirlcanada First person was @LateJuly. First tweetup was #GirlsNightTO where I met @fragileheart & @TheDanLevy among others.

— Raymond Motee (@FunkyBarrister) February 7, 2013

That tweet brought me into the conversation and brought to night the aforementioned night when I first met in the real world people from Twitter. The night was an awesome one hosted by Klout. They called it #KloutTO (yes, amazingly that hashtag search still brings in results from June 2010!) and I met a bunch of stupendous individuals many of whom I count among my friends today including Team SidewalkHustle: @TristanBanning & @HawleyDunbar, Casie Stewart (@casiestewart), Michael Nus, Chris Brooker, Joallore (@clickflickca), Dave (now @BlueFoxCA and not in Toronto but he had a different Twitter handle back then), and many others who right now I can’t remember that I actually met them on that day. I went that day even though I wasn’t an “influencer” which was the reason Klout was throwing the party for the influencers and due to a partnership with Virgin America Airlines and was immediately welcomed into this group of the “cool kids.”

I tweeted this with that rush of fond memories warming my brain:

@sassygirlcanada @FunkyBarrister mine was #KloutTO in 2010! Met @casiestewart @MichaelNus @TristanBanning @HawleyDunbar @clickflickca &more!

— Dan Levy (@TheDanLevy) February 7, 2013

That night the cool kids were so welcoming, in fact, that we ended up grabbing some supper together at Czehoski after the #KloutTO at The Gladstone Hotel event ended. Due to the fact that I suddenly had that memory brought to the forefront of my brain once again I remembered that that night, Casie’s phone had run out of battery and we all joked about how because she wasn’t tweeting a continual stream people might be worried about her. As such it was decided that Nus and I would stage a kidnapped Casie photo and tweet them out demanding a ransom. Fast forward to 2013 when Nus and Casie heard I had found these photos they expressed their interest in the pics and this blog post was born.

Here, in all their glory, are those pics from the night I met Michael Nus and Casie Stewart – among many others – and we ended up kidnapping Casie and holding her for ransom. (Life’s weird like that sometimes.)

Above is what we must have used as the “ransom photo” because the one below is just blurry, Nus is untying the napkins which were holding Casie, and I’m mostly out of the frame, haha.

Also, I clearly make a horrible kidnapper/ransomer with that huge smile plastered across my face!

It honestly amazes me that those 2 pics were taken almost 3 years ago. It feels as if no time has passed and I can’t even imagine what my life would be like without the people I met that night and those I continued to meet via the Toronto tech and social media community. My only regret is not getting involved in the community earlier.

I should mention that it all wouldn’t have happened the way it did if I didn’t force myself to go talk to Dave @BlueFoxCA. At times I can be one of the shyest people ever. That night I remember going into The Gladstone, registering, getting my nametag, a beer, checking in on Foursquare, and standing in a clever pretending to tweet. Everyone at the #KloutTO party seemed to know each other and I knew no one. I sipped that beer hoping I didn’t look awkward or, worse yet, creepy and debated what to do. After a few more minutes I said to that inner, shy voice to piss off and walked over to Dave and introduced myself (it wasn’t difficult, I was wearing a nametag with my name and Twitter handle on it!). I realized that if I didn’t go talk to someone coming out would have been an utter waste of time.

I don’t remember the actual conversation but recall it started with something along the lines of me asking if he was one of the lucky, popular folks getting a free flight to San Francisco or Los Angeles from Klout and Virgin. I also almost immediately openly identified myself as a guy who came out for a free beer and to meet/see who were the lucky tastemakers of Toronto. Dave knew some other people there, introduced me into a circle of folks already deep in conversation and from there I somehow ended up at Czehoski grabbing something to eat, holding Casie ransom, and building some friendships that mean more to me than I can express without a way, way longer blog post. In fact, as I write this I realize just how much more there is to this story and how it should be a whole blog post on its own so I’m going to leave it here.