I have this beautiful friend I have been trying to encapsulate in a blog post since her 50th birthday.

It has not been easy.

I could tell you about how she is literally breathless with excitement every single day. How she lives with a passion that is quite unrivalled. How we have birthdays a few days apart, making us star sisters, as we say, corny as it is, but every darn thing that comes out of her mouth I get, I have felt, I am simpatico with. We are attracted to the same hot colours and cultural influences. We find the same things funny and the same things hard to reconcile with. We both have two daughters, in our hearts we wanted more.

She is a paradox, her plate overflowing with life and yet is pleased by the simplest things.

She is generous and helpful. She is smart and sassy. She is darn sexy and always smells great. She wears feather boas to dinner parties. She adores this city like no one I know. She is a beautiful writer and baker (she is writing a cookbook due out in the Spring called With Love and Sugar). She is an angel. She is a devil.

I could go on and on but instead I will tell you who she is during 10 days in September.

With anticipation as exciting as the event, sometime in August, she pours herself a cold drink and sits on a beach in PEI, a picnic blanket or her own backyard garden and spends hours choosing her TIFF lineup. She then dreams of the perfect person to take to that movie.

Have you ever been considered this lovingly?  It is a treat.

She then calls you up and says I am taking you to this screening, but I will have to meet you there because that will be my fourth movie that day.

And you know the movie will be you. And you know it will her. And you thank your lucky stars that she is your good and wonderful friend

as she flies into the seat beside you full of life, and so many plots, smelling beautiful, with false eyelashes on because, you know, its TIFF and for her that is Christmas.

(Want some Anne in your life? Subscribe to her blog and never see a bad movie again. Her reviews are always spot on. And don’t get me started on the recipes, lets just say my pants are groaning under the strain. I will be letting you all know when the cookbook comes out.)

life with Annie is always a party