When an ex appears in the crowd

Confabulation turns one of life’s most exposed coincidences into a shared evening of live storytelling. At a gathering centred on stories about running into an ex in a crowded room, the awkwardness is not a problem to smooth away; it is the live material. A former partner appears across a supermarket aisle, a packed tram or the queue at a bar, and the person you were before that relationship has to exist in the present.

That scene is immediately legible in Australia. A carriage on the Sydney network can stop with bodies pressed together; a tram in Melbourne announces its next stop before passengers have room to turn. Woolworths and Coles self-checkouts create the same compression of strangers. The geography sharpens the shock as well: Australian cities spread across long distances, so meeting one particular person in one particular place can feel oddly engineered.

A crowded room offers no clean withdrawal. The person can see you, but you may not be ready to be seen. Recognition travels through the body before language catches up: a familiar sleeve, the shape of a laugh, a scent, an old nickname spoken half a beat too soon. Other people become accidental witnesses, and every ordinary movement—a reaching hand, a checked phone, a whispered greeting—can sound like a public announcement.

That mixture of vulnerability and comedy is why the format belongs in a live room rather than a private journal. Confabulation is a monthly Montreal series hosted by actor and comedian Matt Goldberg, with true, unscripted stories from people with diverse backgrounds. At MainLine Theatre, private shock takes on a communal shape without losing the edges that make the story honest.

Recognition before composure

Storytellers often remember the moment they understood what was happening. Before that comes noise: glasses meeting a table, a station announcement, someone apologising for standing in the aisle. Recognition arrives as a pattern rather than a completed fact. A hand looks familiar; a voice uses an old inflection; then the brain supplies the name and the body answers with heat, stillness or an abrupt need to look elsewhere.

Confabulation’s advice to write for your ears fits this kind of scene. A story does not need a floor plan if a bottle cap falling onto wood, a tannoy cutting through conversation or a greeting forced through a tight jaw can establish the space. Sound also preserves delay. It lets the audience hear confidence arrive, fracture and return, which is often more revealing than a neat statement of what happened.

Strong storytelling does not rush directly to the revelation. It follows the half-second before recognition, the social calculations made while pretending not to recognise, and the choice between moving away and staying visible. The crowd becomes part of the suspense because strangers react before the storyteller has control of the room. Their raised eyebrows, redirected attention or sudden offer of space can reveal the danger of the encounter more accurately than an interior monologue could.

Cities, queues and the near escape

On a Sydney train, eye contact becomes choreography. People look at advertisements, phone screens and shoes; a brief turn towards another passenger can feel threatening when the carriage is full. Melbourne trams create a different version of the same pressure, with announcements, wet coats and umbrellas narrowing the available space. In either case, there may be a visible exit, but reaching it means moving in front of the person you are trying not to meet.

Everyday errands produce the same involuntary encounters. At a South Melbourne Market stall, a familiar voice can sound from behind a row of fruit. At a Woolworths or Coles self-checkout, a former partner can appear in the queue with a basket of groceries and a life that looks perfectly ordinary. These scenes work because the meeting is not an occasion anyone prepared. The practical task continues while the emotional task is impossible to postpone.

Distance changes the stakes. In a country where suburbs can occupy hours of travel, an accidental encounter can carry the weight of a long-separated history and a future in which contact now seems possible. A venue in Montreal can hold that weight too, especially for a city shaped by many languages, neighbourhoods and routes through cultural life. The local geography changes; the arithmetic of avoidance does not. Whether someone can leave depends less on the number of doors than on whether leaving would make the encounter more conspicuous than staying.

What the room gives you

A crowd can magnify a private moment, but it can also give the storyteller an audience before the details arrive. This is useful on stage. A pause feels longer when a room is listening. A silence cannot be edited out. The tell becomes part of the shared experience.

The room rewards selective noticing, especially when a performer cannot stop the moment from continuing. Details that can carry a scene include:

• The sound of a familiar voice arriving before the face comes into view
• An object handled repeatedly, such as a key ring, receipt or phone
• Distance measured in steps, doorways or the number of people between two bodies
• A stranger’s involuntary reaction, used as evidence of how unusual the moment feels

Those choices also protect the pace. Details that can crowd out the story include:

• A complete chronology of the relationship that delays the encounter itself
• A private diagnosis offered as a fact rather than a feeling
• The exact motive assigned to the former partner
• Names or identifying details that serve no dramatic purpose

The best detail is not always the loudest one. A strained “hey” may reveal more than a long account of why the relationship ended. Likewise, the story does not need to settle who was wrong. It needs to show what the encounter changed in the air, what the storyteller could not say, and what happened when the crowd made privacy impossible.

Public words and private details

Live stories have an audience but no replay button. Once a detail is spoken, it can be heard by people who know the ex, know the storyteller or recognise the venue. The safest approach is not to turn a real person into a puzzle for strangers. Composite characters, changed identifying details and careful omissions can protect people without sanding away the emotional truth. Truth in live storytelling need not mean distributing proof.

Australian law adds a useful boundary to that craft. The federal Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles set baseline requirements for many organisations that handle personal information, while state and territory rules on recording conversations and surveillance devices differ. Those laws do not answer every question faced by an individual storyteller, but they make the ethical point sharper: a public event is not permission to broadcast identifiable material. Consent from the people in the story matters ethically and can matter legally, especially when recordings, photographs or online clips are involved.

The rule is especially important in a series built around city life. Montreal’s diversity creates room for stories about language, migration, family, romance and belonging that would be flattened by a single dominant perspective. A generous version of a true story notices the other person in the room, including bystanders who never volunteered to become part of the tale. Anonymity is not a lesser truth; it can be the condition that lets a story be told at all.

Humour with dignity

Humour is often the quickest social signal that a difficult story will not swallow the room. It releases tension, but the target has to be chosen carefully. The joke can land on the inconvenience, the narrator’s overconfidence or the absurd choreography of pretending nothing is happening. It works best when it does not ask the former partner to become a punchline.

Australian humour can sharpen this approach because understatement often carries more force than grand declaration. A flat statement about an awkward encounter can invite a laugh without mocking anyone present. The joke may be the narrator noticing that a public place has made private feelings extremely inefficient: three people are blocking a doorway, six phones are recording a band, and the only available route to the street runs directly past the person being avoided.

Matt Goldberg’s role as host matters because live storytelling depends on the space between stories. A well-timed response can acknowledge the audience without taking control away from the teller. It can redirect attention when a detail exposes more than intended and let the room reset before the next voice begins. The best hosting does not polish away uncertainty; it gives the uncertainty a shape the audience can hold.

Carrying the story forward

The encounters in this theme vary widely: a supermarket, a train, a wedding, a neighbourhood bar, a concert where the exit is blocked by the band. Their common feature is not the breakup itself. It is the collision between an old identity and the people now seeing it. A live story can explore that collision through sound, timing and the reactions of strangers, turning one person’s memory into a room-wide experience without pretending every life follows the same pattern.

The values behind Confabulation make that approach possible. True and unscripted does not mean careless. Diverse backgrounds do not mean a performance should explain itself to an audience. Community-oriented storytelling means the room is part of the meaning: laughter, silence and discomfort can reveal how people recognise the scene even when the details differ. At MainLine Theatre, the series’ usual pay-what-you-can admission keeps the event open without pretending that money is irrelevant.

The concrete next step is one calendar entry for the next monthly show at MainLine Theatre, carrying both its confirmed date and the chosen pay-what-you-can amount.