Remember “Dave from Vancouver Island” and the successful search to reunite long-lost friends earlier this summer?
Well, now, a Vancouver Island woman is hoping residents can once again pull together to help — this time with her own needle-in-a-haystack search.
Chelsea Wakelyn posted to Facebook recently, requesting help tracking down a band she and her late fiancé, Kris Noesgaard, stumbled upon one late night in 2011 as the group performed George Michael’s “Careless Whisper” in an underground parking lot in Saanich. The group was filming the performance and Wakelyn, who’s tried several times to seek out the footage on her own, hopes to find the video.
“This is a long, long shot, but I’m going to give it one anyway,” she posted.
Wakelyn’s memory of the night is hazy — she guesses the performance likely occurred some time between January and September — but she told Black Press Media she and her fiancé came across the band in the underground lot of the Saanich Centre as the couple walked back from the Monkey Tree Pub. She said she remembers the two dancing as the band played.
“I remember at least thinking and probably said out loud, ‘Is this real life that we stumbled upon a band in the middle of the night playing in an empty, underground parking lot?’ I imagine if there is any audio or video, it would probably have captured our disbelief and delight,” she said. “It was such a magical thing, really.”
Noesgaard died in 2015, and the memory has since gained new importance for Wakelyn.
“I never would have suspected that it would come to have this kind of meaning that it does to me,” she said.
Both Wakelyn’s and Noesgaard’s daughters — from previous partnerships — were nine years old at the time of his death, and the couple’s son was 18 months. Wakelyn, who described Noesgaard as a passionate and devoted dad, said she hopes to show the footage to the kids.
“It would be nice and special for them to kind of have a little bit of a happy snapshot of our relationship.”
READ ALSO: So, they found ‘Dave from Vancouver Island’
The couple’s relationship was less than a year old when the two stumbled upon the band. The spark was so strong, Wakelyn joked, she felt the group was performing solely for them.
“It was that beginning, sort of, twilight, limerence,… flash of new love, so when stuff like that happens, you’re like, ‘Oh, these people are here just for us.'”
Wakelyn said she remembers the band members being in their mid-20s to mid-30s, wearing suits. One member was in a pork-pie-style hat.
She doesn’t remember, or isn’t even sure she asked, the name of the band or the members, but she said she hopes a public plea will bring one of the members forward.
“If those other folks can find ‘Dave from Vancouver Island’ from 1969, maybe I can find the Careless Whisper parking garage band from 2011,” Wakelyn wrote on Facebook.
