Above (from left to right, top to bottom, starting at the top left) – Aidan Costelloe, Andrew McCorquodale, Jay Steele, Andria Ink, Chris Haines, James Peck, Chris Chanyi, Steve Lockhart, Barry Morocho
Article by 20802 Andrew McCorquodale
This started as a virtual happy hour as part of a promotion to help support local restaurants and pubs – Molson Canadian bought a gift certificate to my local pub (the Unionville Arms) when I published this pic on Instagram (despite us not having any of their product in the pic!). Some former members of Tango Flight, Class of 97 got together via Zoom in April for the promotion. We enjoyed it so much we started meeting weekly and quickly expanded the invite list. We met weekly until September and since then we’ve been meeting once a month.
At our peak “Tango Flight and Friends” had 15 or 16 attendees all at once – that was our extraordinary Christmas meeting – and we still have regular attendance of 6 to 10 folks once a month. We’ve probably had visits from 20 or 25 different folks total.
We have yet to run out of old stories, catching up, political discussions or reasons to hassle each other over long-past indiscretions, so I expect this group is going to persist – and hopefully someday transition to occasional meetings in-person!
Positives out of the pandemic are very hard to find, but establishing renewed connections with everyone who has attended so far is definitely one of them.