Get All Your Friends Together and Scream Them

At 7pm last night, I shut down my work computer, finished the beer I'd been working on, and headed out the door. About a block away from our office is the "W" Cut Rate Liquors. As I approached I passed a small group of punk kids smoking cigarettes. Next to the entrance to the liquor store was a nondescript grey wooden door. I followed a couple of skinny-jean-clad guys through it and up the stairs. I paid the bored and disinterested guy outside the apartment a five and squeezed through the door that was partially blocked by a crowd that filled the whole front room.

Thick-rimmed glasses, mohawks, tight jeans, brightly dyed hair, print dresses, hoodies, dreadlocks, flannel, baseball caps, scarves, polos, stocking caps -- the crowd contained a scenester from every genre imaginable (well, except for thugs). But instead of the cliquishness that one might expect, everyone was mingling, drinking, and laughing together.

The opening acts played and the crowd hollered and applauded. I talked with a thirty-something guy and his boyfriend who recorded the whole show on his iPhone. I joked around with a tiny girl who offered to buy the underage skater kids next to her some beer from downstairs. A chick with a lesbian haircut and a Gatorade bottle filled with beer kept including me in her conversations. A girl who was entirely too drunk on whiskey Cokes introduced herself, her friend, and the girl next to her that I'd just watched her meet.

After an hour and a half, the headliner, Paul Baribeau, came up "on stage" (I imagine it was a wooden box or a milk crate.) at the end of the living room and began to play. The whole crowd belted out the words and swayed in unison. My voice screamed out and joined the cacophony. For one moment I was able to connect with an entire group of people who I might otherwise never have come in contact or had anything in common with. The camaraderie of the crowd, the intimacy of a hundred people crowded into a tiny apartment, the anticipation, the excitement -- the memory of it is almost surreal, as if I watched it in a movie instead of having experienced it directly.