By the time I got to the Kabuki, most of the movies were either done or almost done. I wandered around looking for Michael and saying hello to people. Finally I found him in the Q&A session of a movie on the secon floor. A German woman was talking about the problems of filming a movie in Brazil. We listened for ten minutes, then Michael said he was ready to leave.

We ended up in one of those hard little knots of company and conversation that ensue just before or after an event, when ther are rides to catch and places to go. Finally, someone observed we needed to get to the party and after various negotiations, renegotiations, and false start we scattered into a couple of cars that would take us to the restaurant. Michael and I rode with a heavy-faced woman, a younger, dark-haired girl, and an African filmmaker. I sat in the back between the filmmaker and Michael. On our way over, we got onto the subject of a documentary in the festival that I had disliked intensely, and I launched into a rant about it as the kind of smug, elitist self-justification I used to encounter growing up in the deep south. It only occured to me as we’d turned onto Mission and came in sight of the restaurant that it was quite possible that documentary’s director and/or producer was, at this moment, in the car with us.

Fortunately, they were not.