Now Pixar is my favourite: I’ve been watching their shorts since you had to go to animation festivals to see them, they’re the first of the 3 companies I would drop everything for, and much to my kids’ embarrassment, I’ve cried during every movie.

I might have even cried when I heard they were coming to town. I had to apply. It was a sign.

Since “owning lots of Pixar toys” wasn’t relevant experience for any of these jobs, and I knew they were going to get a lot of applications, I decided to take them seriously and literally apply for the position of Human Cannonball.

I grabbed the domain, made a website, crafted a persona, designed postcards, and reached out to my entire network to help create a viral sensation and get Pixar’s attention.

And this part was amazing! My family, friends, and colleagues all pitched in to propel me forward, posting terrible puns and flooding my LinkedIn with recommendations (which I still use to this day).

But I needed to keep the momentum going. Coincidentally, I was due to run with my kids as part of the Vancouver Sun Run, Canada’s biggest 10K race where over 40,000 people would be competing and a bunch more cheering them on.

Now just trust me on this part, but I happened to have a small collection of jumpsuits I had found in thrift stores over the years. One was for a Ghostbuster costume, another was randomly fireproof, and one was this crazy ill-fitting white & red striped flared skydiving outfit.

I was working at Kwantlen University in those days in the Wilson School of Design, and right downstairs was the fashion department. I found this exceedingly nice student who offered to alter the suit and make it actually wearable.

Completely unrelated to his pioneering work on alterations to a Human Cannonball jumpsuit, he went on to be named “Canada’s Breakthrough Designer” and probably does not want to be associated with my story at this point in his fashion career.

Fast forward to another set of coincidences: we were planning a family road trip down the coast to California, and I happened to read that Pixar was hosting a benefit for the San Francisco Film Society that, while a little pricey, got you into the studio.

So we shifted around our vacation route to make the timing work out perfectly, and my family was very patient as I continually interrupted the road trip so I could record vignettes of the Human Cannonball marching all the way to Emeryville.

I can’t stress enough how nerve-racking it was to set foot on such storied ground in the stupidest outfit imaginable, but in the end it was unforgettable. I got to tour the campus and see Toy Story 3 in Dolby 3D a week before it was released, crying through both sets of glasses.