“When I first saw it, I thought, ‘No way, that's not ... I can't believe that's us,’ ” said Thomas in an interview with the Toronto Star this morning. “Then I looked some more and realized, that is us. That's a very revealing picture of us.”
Thomas and her boyfriend, Scott Jones, were watching Game 7 of the Stanley Cup final Wednesday night at one of the downtown venues when a riot began.
Within minutes after the game ended a group, identified as anarchists and hooligans by Vancouver's mayor and Vancouver’s police chief, began setting cars on fire and smashing windows.
Thomas said this morning that everything happened so fast that there was just massive confusion all around.
“I was trying to understand what was going on. The photo was definitely not something we expected to happen,” said Thomas.
The couple is leaving in three days on a trip to California, before Scott heads back to Australia. Thomas said the response from her friends and family has been overwhelming.
“When I saw that picture I couldn't believe it and then I looked at it more and realize it's quite artistic and really something beautiful.”
On Friday morning, Scott spoke with his dad, Brett, by Skype in Australia after his family first identified the couple when the photo was seen worldwide.
“How’s that for making love, not war,” Brett declared on his Facebook page, telling the world that the famous Romeo in a Vancouver riot picture is his son.
“She had actually been injured,” Brett Jones told the Star Friday morning from his home in Perth, Australia. “She had been knocked down by a shield” from the riot police.
“He lay down next to her to comfort her. She was crying and he just kissed her to calm her down.”
Even as a young boy, said Brett Jones, Scott demonstrated his “gentle side for other people. I’m not surprised he would comfort Alex.”
Thomas, who graduated with a degree in environmental engineering from the University of Guelph, works in Vancouver on the Zipcar street team and as a technician for the FreshPure reverse-osmosis water-filtration systems in Whole Foods grocery stores.
The couple had been to the Stanley Cup final earlier that night on which the Vancouver Canucks lost to the Boston Bruins. Within minutes, the city erupted into a riot.
Brett, who with his wife runs life coaching firm Cre8, has spoken to his second eldest son, one of six Jones children, about the couple’s new-found international fame.
“I don’t think he’s come to grips with it. The full force of it is going to hit him today.”
Dad’s advice “would be to take it in his stride and enjoy it while he’s got it.”
Scott and Alex started dating shortly after the young Australian actor arrived in Vancouver on a working holiday. Since leaving acting school in Melbourne, Scott has mostly been bartending, as he has been in Vancouver, but he did get one standup comedy gig in the city.
Comedy performance is “his passion,” said Brett Jones. “He has a natural ability to make people laugh.”
Jones senior can see that the couple’s now-iconic photograph may follow them for the rest of their lives, for good or ill.
“Relationships do buckle under that pressure unless you have the ability to be very centred. Even if it wasn’t Scott, the guy who took the picture captured a moment in time that is iconic.”
Brett Jones has also counselled Scott not to buckle to the doubters, rampant on the skeptical, know-it-all Internet, who say the photograph was staged.
“Tell your story as it happened and there’s nothing you can do about them,” he told his son. “I think it’s amazing.”
Scott’s sister, Hannah, first identified her brother to an Australian news network.
“It is something he would do, that's our boy,” Scott’s mother Marie told ninemsn in Australia. “He has always lived in his own world, he's special like that. He doesn’t always connect with what’s going on around him.
“I knew it was him because he doesn't have a lot of clothes with him and he always puts on the same thing.”
Vancouver photographer Rich Lam snapped the shot during the riots after the final on Wednesday.
He said he is “very surprised” the picture has received so much attention because he did not even realize the couple was kissing until hours later.
“The riot police made a charge, so we were running. I looked back and there were two people lying on the street. At first I thought she was hurt,” he told the Star’s Jenni Dunning.
“I didn’t know what I had until I came back and gave (the photo) to my editors. That was just a brief moment in all the mayhem.”
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