Of all the talks and convos at last month’s Sunstone conference, one odd experience stands out. Historian Connell O’ Donovan always makes me laugh and learn, so I was excited he agreed to have coffee with me the morning before the conference started. All I had to do was pick him up on the way to Alchemy Coffee, which he described as a lovely queer hangout.
Lyft is not part of my daily life as a Luddite (I sent my first text less than a decade ago), and so I was mighty proud of myself for telling the app that I wanted to make two stops, not one. When the ride arrived at Connell’s, he was in the mood for another lovely queer hangout, Coffee Garden. Easy peasy, said our driver Roxanne, she knew right where it was. She ignored the screen on the dash and relied on the noggin on her shoulders. Good thing too, because I had *no* idea how to change a stop en route.
Salt Lake City in August is too hot for this San Franciscan, but the heat does reveal iced coffee’s true glory. Connell was definitely in his. He taught me the secret handshake for God to pull me into heaven (alas, I’ve already forgotten the magic words), told me why the second street named after Harvey Milk is in Salt Lake City, discovered a glamour shot of my grandmother as a young woman, and turned me on to a classic lesbian vampire movie. And that’s before discussing his long-term project, a history of drag performances in Utah, which includes one in 1882 by the future director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
So far, so great. But the ride back was not as convenient as our ride there. This time it was Alejandro who picked us up. Connell and I continued chatting until Alejandro stopped a couple (long) blocks before Connell’s stop and declared the ride over. No, Connell, said, his home was a bit further up. But Alejandro insisted that this was the place, the only place, and he could not move an inch. Things got a little heated. At one point, he pulled his phone off the dash and waved it in our faces, saying he was not allowed to drive anywhere else.
I fumbled with my phone, trying to change the drop-off location, and Alejandro snapped his phone back into place, right next to a replica of the Jesus-in-space statue featured in the North Visitor Center in Temple Square. Connell tried reason, surely he knew where his own home was. Alejandro gave rank to the app and its higher rules, pointing to his phone’s screen as incontrovertible evidence of what he was supposed to do . While I tried to get the app in the cloud to conform to our reality on the ground, Connell got out of the car; he’d decided to make the journey under his own power.
By heeding the higher authority of Lyft algorithm rather than his own experience, our driver earned a smaller tip, brought contention into the car, and made a busy man walk several extra minutes in the heat.
Dear reader, I will leave it to you to decide which driver acted more Christlike, and which more like the Church.
Well, it sounds like you and Connell had a fine start to the day with iced coffee and conversation. Cheers to you both! As for Alejandro, perhaps you should have slipped him the secret handshake in lieu of a tip. 😉
Fun story, but it leaves me curious about your grandmother and about his new project…
Reminds me of the episode of The Office when they trusted their GPS and went into a lake. Sometimes the common sense filter just doesn’t catch things for people!