By Tim Kiladze

Illustration by Franke James.

Never have we ever had a stranger over for dinner and enlightened conversation. But author, artist, and photographer Franke James has, and she’s transformed the experience into a piece of art on her website that details how it all went down.
For something so bold, the dinner was organized with little hassle. Mark Shouldice, a Toronto-based grade 4/5 teacher, was scrambling to find a Christmas gift for his partner Hillary when he came across James’s website and thought a dinner with her would be interesting—both he and Hillary “had talked a lot about the power of conversations with strangers and how often when you connect with a stranger, people are more likely to divulge things.” He attributes this to the ability to leave the conversation and have nothing you said remain permanent or held against you in the future.

Shouldice’s propositional email to James was terse and to the point: he explained that he was interested in her work and offered to donate $200 (the money for Hillary’s Christmas gift) to a charity of her choice in exchange for hosting him and a guest for dinner. James’s initial reaction was to-be-expected: “Is this a joke? Who is this guy? He’s inviting himself over for dinner to our house?” But she mulled over the concept and realized that she thought it was a cool idea and decided to give Shouldice the benefit of the doubt because his letter was well written. She also Googled his name and felt satisfied with what she found.

Illustration by Franke James.

Instead of asking for any more information, James agreed to the dinner and asked Shouldice if he was camera shy—she thought she might be able to make some art out of the experience. “I was doing my best to have some fun with this,” she said, “and yet be careful at the same time.” Her reply also requested that Shouldice send the money he offered to the Yonge Street Mission. Within two hours of sending the note, she received a tax receipt in her inbox.
The dinner went down on January 24, and both James and Shouldice adamantly state that there wasn’t any awkwardness during their time together. Shouldice does admit that he was “kind of worried” about sustaining conversation, but the discussion flowed easily from his teaching to Hillary’s time in Rwanda to James’s art and business (she’s the co-founder of The James Gang: Creative Services). “After the night ended,” he said, “it almost seemed too normal.”
Although James experimented with the dinner out of her own intrigue, she’s realized that the format has fundraising potential for community groups and charities; because Shouldice was willing to pay to have dinner with her, James believes a church, for example, could formulate a list of interesting people in its parish and ask if they would consider hosting a dinner for people who offer to donate money for the opportunity to chat with them. In this vision, her dinner was just the first of many “seeds dropping in very rich soil.” As for her own adventures, James isn’t quite finished with the notion of dinner with strangers—she’s already arranged a second for sometime in March.