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swing dancers and boggle enthusiasts
Sunday, September 30 2001
It was a cold and rainy day, perfect for sitting around and reading magazines or perhaps watching lots and lots of useless teevee.
In the evening Gretchen and I went to a little pot luck party down on President Street between 6th and 7th Avenue here in Park Slope. The party was being hosted by one of Ray's friends, a chick named Amy who is part of two different scenes: the one Gretchen and Ray frequent as well as a group of, well, swing dancers. I only knew a few of the people there, so I mostly just hung back eating a bean and sea-horse-head-shaped-pasta salad while Gretchen did all the talking. During a fairly long part of the conversation these two guys were telling about their various coping mechanisms for dealing with weirdoes, the kind of people you keep stumbling across in the park who want your address and phone number, things you don't want to provide accurately, but you don't want to tell an obvious lie either because you know you're going to run across these people again.
Gretchen didn't really care which room we hung out in so long as it was away from the one baby that one of the guests had brought. The baby was actually more of a toddler, and an exceptionally ugly one at that, with an enormously fat face flushed inexplicably red. Avoiding the baby kept us in the room with the swing dancers for awhile. Mercifully, though, they had yet to lapse into shop talk about dancing (they did that later). Swing dancers have their own exclusive culture just like punk rockers or scrabble enthusiasts, but I wasn't really in a good mindset for learning more.
When the fat-faced baby had been taken home, Gretchen and I joined Ray and the other non-swing-dancers in a cozy little bedroom lit entirely by antique candelabrot. There we spent much of our time talking about Boggle and Scrabble, two tile-based word games that most in the room loved to play. But none of these people were anywhere near as hardcore as the social reject Scrabble champions whose stories are told in Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble, a book that one in attendance had actually read. (Gretchen and I have only read the book's review in the New York Times book section.)
Inevitably, there was also some conversation about the World Trade Center disaster. Neither Gretchen nor I had known anyone who had been killed, but others in the room had. Ray, who used to work as a waiter in the adjacent World Financial Center (before it was destroyed) recognized some of his customers in photographs in the makeshift memorials. Ray's friend, a guy with sideburns whose name I forget, couldn't get over the fact that two guys he'd known back in the day, two guys with completely different life stories and personalities, ultimately succumbed to the same terrible fate.
This may have been the first party I ever attended in which I didn't drink alcoholic beverages continuously. At 33 years of age, perhaps I'm growing up! Being drunk, especially in social situations, doesn't hold the same appeal for me these days.
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