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Straight woman flirted with a gay man in a parking lot and the misunderstanding is heartwarming

It meant something to both of them for totally different reasons.

via WowRealNeat/TikTok and TifanieMayberry/TikTok

Tifanie Mayberry and David Frazier discuss their chance encounter.

Usually, when you read a story about people being confronted in a grocery store parking lot, it's bad news. But not this time. Back in November of 2023, Portland, Oregon-based photographer David Frazier had an uplifting experience in the parking lot of a New Seasons market after being approached by a female admirer.

He later told the story on TikTok in a video that received over 3.4 million views. While making a quick run to the store, Frazier parked next to a woman driving a Tesla. He noticed she was eating, hanging around, and “vibing,” so he flashed her a smile and went into the store, where he picked up a bite to eat.

Upon returning to his car, the woman was still there. She rolled down her window and asked Frazier, “Hey, are you single?” Frazier was taken aback by the question and replied: “Sadly, yes, I am. Um, also very gay, though.”

@wowrealneat

Dear New Seasons Parking Lot Girl, you’re so cool and ily ❤️ #fyp #portland #parkinglot #xoxo

 

He told the woman he was flattered and that asking never hurts. "You're just so handsome," she replied. Frazier returned the compliment, calling her "pretty," and the two shared a laugh and went their separate ways.

But the interaction stuck with Frazier. He thought it took real "guts" to tell a stranger you think they're attractive. He also felt that it was "kind" and "flattering" for her to compliment him. "She seemed like such a genuine and kind and earnest" and "cool" person, he said in the video.

He hoped the TikTok video he made would eventually reach her somehow. “You have uplifted me in a way that I didn’t know I needed, and it made me feel amazing, and I just wanted to say thank you and I hope you have such an incredible weekend,” Frazier told the woman through his post. He also invited her to get a “friend coffee.”'

Five weeks after Frazier posted the video, it successfully reached its intended audience of one. Tifanie Mayberry, the woman driving the Tesla, saw it. She shared a reaction video in which she watched Frazier’s original post. The video received over 11 million views.

@tifaniemayberry

#duet with @David #fyp WOW!! Never expected for this to come back around like this. OMG. The internet is internetting and I LOVE it!!

 

Mayberry followed up the reaction video with another, explaining that her behavior in the parking lot that day was a perfect example of where she is in life. She’s 35, single, and ready to settle down and have kids. If that means she has to be a little forward in approaching men, so be it.

"So what you're witnessing is me just being like no BS and being 'like okay if I see me a good one, I just like to lasso them, and reel 'em in’ and be like 'Hey, I'm interested,' and that's just kind of where I am in life. And apparently, this one got back to me in a very unexpected way,” she said.

Mayberry added that she has yet to speak with Frazier but is looking forward to meeting him. She hopes that one day he’ll even make it to her wedding. "Do I want to be wing friends? Absolutely. Do I want him to be at my wedding when I finally get married? Absolutely," she said. "I just have such a deep appreciation for the love that has transpired from this sweet little moment. Never had I expected it to come into this form."


@tifaniemayberry

Well its been a very funny ending to 2023, and I have to say it ended things on such a great note for me 🥹❤️✨ Thanks TikTok!! @David - Coffee in the New Year?!

 


This article originally appeared last year.

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Equality

I made my daughter cry by sharing the history of a local landmark. She needed to hear it.

Finetooth/Wikimedia Commons

I made my 11-year old daughter cry yesterday.

We were driving to the beach, and we passed the Portland Expo Center. It's not the usual way we go, but the traffic was bad and this would let us avoid downtown.

I asked her if she knew anything about World War 2, and she knew a little… she remembered, for instance, that in that war the US was fighting against Germany and Japan.

So I pointed out the Expo building to her, and I told her, "During the war, the US government was afraid that Americans with Japanese heritage might be spies or might side with Japan, so they gathered them all up in that building. It was a livestock building. They moved all the cattle out and moved all the people in, and they kept them there for almost a year."

"Did they kill them?" she asked.

"No," I said. "But they all lost their jobs. Many of them lost their businesses, their houses, and most of their possessions."

She didn't say anything after that, but she's a sensitive kid and I looked over to see that she was softly crying, wiping the tears from her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

Why would I do that to my kid?

Well it's not because of "CRT" or because I hate white people, or because I want her to. It's not because I'm cruel or overly fixated on race. It's not because of political correctness or politics.

It's because things like this still happen today and they'll happen again in the future and when that day comes I don't want her to stick her head in the sand and say, "Well that could never happen in the Land of the Free," but instead be one of the people standing up to say, "Not this again, this is wrong, how dare you."

It's because she has Asian-American friends, and when they are in danger or the victims of Anti-Asian racism or violence I don't want her to be confused or surprised, I want her to be able to stand in the gap to protect, support, and comfort her friends.

It's because she has Latina friends who have been deported. It's because she has Asian-American friends who have family members who have been spit on or harassed. And just because she's 11 and white doesn't mean she should be shielded from that… her friends of color aren't. She's old enough to know that the world her friends live in is the same world she's in.

And yes, she needs to know that these things happened in living memory. That right now there's a kind older woman who volunteers at the Japanese American Museum of Oregon who will tell you the story of when her family packed their bags and met at the Expo Center. She'll tell you about how they stayed in a cattle stall with a sheet for a door, and how the flypaper hung over her, heavy with flies, while her family tried to figure out what was going to happen to them all, what their own government was going to do to them (the answer being, send them to a camp in California and then transfer them to a camp in Idaho where they would live one family to a room, sleeping on cots, the guards outside the camp with their rifles, barbed wire on the fences. The answer being that some of their fathers and brothers got out early if they volunteered to fight, but the families remained in the camps, imprisoned by their own government, not "innocent until proven guilty" but "presumed guilty because of their ethnicity.").

She needs to know that if every story she ever hears about the USA is "we are the good guys" that she's listening to liars. We have done some incredible, beautiful things in the world (and still are), and we have done some horrific, evil things in the world (and still are).

Because we're not raising her to be a good American, we're raising her to be a good person.

And because when we're driving through the streets of our cities, the history matters. We should be able to point out, "This church belonged to Black people until the city decided it was time to revitalize downtown and they forced all the African Americans north, out of downtown." We should be able to say, "This is Fort Vancouver" and also know that the coming of that fort meant that in a span of barely thirty years entire cultures of Native people were nearly wiped out by smallpox and other diseases… and many of the remaining peoples were forced onto the worst pieces of land at the threat of death so that the great American empire could continue to expand.

I tell my daughter all of this not because of some political agenda. I tell her because it's true.

I tell her this because if she's going to be a good citizen she needs to know what to fight against. She needs to know who we've been to recognize who we are.

I tell her this because I love America and I want us to be better.

I tell her this because I love her and I don't want her to grow up closing her eyes to injustice.

I tell her this because she needs to know that when we talk about camps built for racist reasons in World War 2 we call them "concentration camps" in Germany and we call them "internment camps" in California or Idaho. She needs to know that we try to hide it, to soften it, to make it somehow something understandable rather than something evil.

I tell her this because once upon a time on May 2nd, 1942, three thousand six hundred and seventy-six Japanese Americans showed up at the Expo center carrying their bags – they could only bring what they could carry -- or carrying their infants and toddlers, and were moved into cattle stalls. They lived there, in our city, for five months until we could get our camps built, get the barbed wire installed, get the guard posts filled, get the trains ready to pack with our own citizens.

I tell her because their story – OUR story – matters. She needs to know.

I tell her all this because if she's never cried about something America has done, she doesn't know America.

This post was first published on the author's Facebook page. Find more writing from Matt Mikolatos on his website.

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Heroes

Don’t forget the heroes who gave their lives stopping a racist’s deadly train assault

Jeremy Christian is the name in the headlines. But Ricky John Best and Taliesin Myrddin Namkai-Meche are the names worth remembering. In sacrificing their lives to protect those of two innocent strangers, they leave behind a legacy that while tragic, can also inspire hope and meaning in others.

Back in 2017, Christian boarded a Max train in Portland, Oregon where he began verbally harassing two young female minority passengers, one of whom was wearing a hijab. When that harassment escalated to threats of physical violence, three brave passengers intervened. Christian pulled a knife from his coat and attacked the three passengers, fatally wounding Best and Namkai-Meche.

As an Oregon native, I can attest that few events have rattled the local population like this. Often considered a progressive oasis, Oregon has faced more than its share of racist and right-wing incidents over the years. But there was a unique urgency to this event and the way these three genuine heroes responded in the face of violent bigotry that impacted people who call Portland home.

Local vigils were held for the victims. At the time, survivor Micah Fletcher refused to take credit for his heroic intervention, instead saying that attention should remain focused on the two young girls targeted by Christian:

"Can you imagine being the little girl on that MAX [train]?" he says in the video. "This man is screaming at you. ... Everything about him is cocked and loaded and ready to kill you."

"So brave that young girls experience that and still find ways to wake up in the morning with smiles on their faces, to trudge through the day and make their parents proud," he continues.

Reportedly, Namkai-Meche's own last words were a message of love, telling a fellow passenger on the train who was attempting to comfort him in his dying moments:

"He said, 'Tell them, I want everybody to know, I want everybody on the train to know, I love them.'"

Christian will likely spend the rest of his life in prison. And that's where he belongs for committing such horrible crimes and for showing zero remorse. His actions should not be forgotten, lest we allow hateful crimes like it to be perpetrated again.

However, when it comes to headlines and the stories we choose to tell in remembrance, it's an important opportunity to keep the focus on the three men who literally put their lives on the line in the name of decency, especially for those two who are no longer with us. And as Fletcher himself said, the focus going forward should be on the two young women who were the targets of violence to begin with. Using this as an opportunity to face the toxic elements of our culture, treat them, and move forward, is the best way to honor those who paid the ultimate price to protect the innocent.

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Heroes

A story about a man who swims to work went viral. Here's what makes his commute possible.

Benjamin David lives in Munich, and he swims to work.

Every morning, David checks the speed and temperature of the water...

All GIFs via BBC Capital/Facebook.

...puts on his swim trunks and packs his dry bag with the clothes and gear he needs for the day...

...and swims 2,000 meters, or about 1.25 miles, down the Isar River to work.

Thanks to a great video from BBC Capital, David's story went viral last week. But lost in the surprising and delightful nature of his morning commute is what's making it possible: efforts in major cities to clean up polluted urban rivers and return them to swimmers.

Cities like Paris, New York, Boston, and London have all made an effort to return their rivers to swimmers and beachgoers.

Local governments are partnering with civic nonprofits to raise funds for cleanup, natural pools, and marketing efforts. Why focus on swimming? It's affordable, safe, and fun for residents of all ages, and public access to rivers and lakes is a great way to build community and inspire people to care about their waterways.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has made cleaning up the River Seine a priority and hopes to have open-water swimming events in the waterway for the 2024 Olympics. In July, she opened canal water pools in a section of the Bassin de la Villette canal in northern Paris. These clean swimming zones are sectioned off and filtered to ensure a safe dip.

Photos by Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty Images.

American cities are pushing for river pools too. For seven years, a nonprofit in New York City has been working on +POOL, a floating swimming pool in the shape of a plus sign that can filter impurities through its walls. They have a bevy of backers and great designs but are currently in a holding pattern with the city, waiting for a site to install it.

An artist's rendering of +POOL, the idea of am NYC nonprofit. Image via +POOL.

One city that's seeing the benefits of returning the river to swimmers is Portland, Oregon.

The city is split in half by the Willamette River, a thoroughfare still used to export grain and dry-dock ships. But despite Portland's eco-friendly persona, the river was long neglected and prone to sewage overflows. With the completion of the Big Pipe, a sewage infrastructure project, the Willamette has been remarkably clean and safe for swimming. Yet it was still hard to persuade residents to dive in.

Photo by Ian Sane/Flickr.

That's where local nonprofit group Human Access Project comes in. The group of volunteers pursues its mission of transforming Portland's relationship with the river by creating public spaces like access points and beaches, supporting education and conservation efforts, and, of course, jumping in for a dip. The HAP hosts the Big Float — a floating party in the river — an annual river swim with Mayor Ted Wheeler, and even has a swim team called the River Huggers. Yeah, seriously.

"For us, swimability is a platform for hope," says HAP Founder and Ringleader Willie Levenson. "Our hope is that if we can reconnect people with the river through their own self-interest, through something that will benefit them — being able to get into the water and swim — they will naturally care more about the outcomes of what's happening in the watershed. They'll naturally be more inclined to fight for this thing that they love and enjoy."

The River Huggers take to the water. Photo via Human Access Project, used with permission.

Are swimmable rivers and lakes not on your city's radar? There's still a lot you can do.

While most people don't have the time to found and organize their own nonprofit like Levenson, there are similar groups like the Waterkeepers or your local watershed council that are already doing this work. Donate your time or make a contribution to keep the good going.

You can also start using the body of water to swim, kayak, or relax. It's fun, affordable, and close to home. Check the water quality test results online before jumping in, and bring a friend or swim buddy. Let your local elected officials know you want safe access to your water and support candidates that make it a priority.

You may not use it to commute, like David, or create a float party with thousands of your closest friends, like Willie Levenson, but it's your community and your water, and you deserve a clean, safe place to enjoy it.

Beachgoers enjoy Portland's newest river access point, Poet's Beach. Photo via Human Access Project, used with permission.

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