When I was 20 I moved to Calgary to start my working life. My boyfriend and I rented the main floor suite of an Eaton’s catalogue home. The owner had converted it into three separate living spaces. At that time, the house was filled with five scrappy artists. Our landlord was an actor who lived upstairs with a roommate. He also had a traumatized cat he’d adopted who was named Snuffy. In the basement lived an actor/writer who elevated the persona of a charming curmudgeon to the level of archetype. My boyfriend was a theatre and audio technician. I worked as a poorly paid receptionist/salesperson/voice-over artist at a recording studio.