We began eyeing empty storefronts the way I’d seen straight boys look at sports cars or dogs stare at steaks. We started writing down phone numbers off real estate signs and lay in bed talking about them until we fell asleep. One evening, as we were riding through Kensington Market, we noticed an old barbershop for lease. We locked our bikes to a nearby fence, wandered over to the darkened window, and peered in. The space was modest, with fluorescent light fixtures in the drop ceiling and walls plastered with decades-old posters of pompadoured hair models. Along one wall were three barber chairs positioned in front of three frameless mirrors. The opposite wall was lined with a row of metal folding chairs, where I imagined customers would have once sat waiting for their haircuts while reading magazines.

Will and I looked at each other and smiled. It was perfect. We let ourselves be swept along by a torrent of grandiose ideas and far-fetched plans as we unlocked our bikes and goaded one other into doing it (Let’s just fucking do it), until I called the number on the real estate sign. We arranged a meeting with the agent for the next morning, signed the lease, and before we knew it we were on our hands and knees scrubbing three decades’ worth of hair from between the cracks in the black-and-white vinyl tiles. With the help of some of our handier friends — mainly lesbians and theatre school tech geeks — we built a small wooden stage, hung two black curtains and a makeshift grid of LED lights, and filled the space with thirty additional chairs, all mismatching and in varying states of collapse, collected from garage sales and sidewalks on garbage nights.

Ana came over one night with two bottles of wine and some Indian takeout. She knew we’d been fretting about how to make the first month’s rent and was determined to take our minds off it. As the three of us sat around the kitchen table, we started throwing out names for the space. After a particularly ridiculous spate of suggestions, Ana offered up Videodrome, in honour of our nights binge-watching David Cronenberg films as teenagers. We started riffing off “video,” pairing it with random words. We liked how the word conjured a kind of nineties analogue aesthetic, something a bit degraded and do-it-yourself. Also, Will and I wanted to host screenings at the space. Video art, low-budget outings by local filmmakers, cult classics. The front room was no bigger than a suburban garage but we had outsized ambitions for it, imagining it functioning fluidly as an art gallery, performance space, and a cinema, perhaps all within the course of the same day and night.