the Dining Roomer

It has been said that Buffalo is not a small town, it's a large room.  

Think of the last house party you went to.  It's three in the morning.  Hey, there's that guy who always takes his clothes off at parties.  There's that girl you made out with in the phone booth at the Pink last summer.  Oh, you're out of the beer that you BYO-ed.  But at least there's still some hummus and a slice of pizza left. 

And the no-clothes guy gets up and starts peeling away layers, and your friend offers you one of his Labatt Blues while you tell him about the make-out girl and are mowing down on ethnically disparate cuisine, and all is as it should be in the large-room-sized-world.

But it's when all is not as it should be -- and the bathroom is locked for some ungodly purpose, and a partygoer has turned the kitchen sink into a vomitorium, and your ex shows up with your other ex's ex, and you are forced to pee outside, and your bestie is huffing floorwax in the next room -- it's then that the novelty of this "large room" is brought home.  And becomes interesting.

houseparty antic metaphors aside (finally), the Buffalo community is a dynamic one, for all of it's smallness.  I suppose that's the reason why it feels like 13th grade, sometimes.  Street cred is built on the same balance that all good storytelling is based on -- authenticity, drama, and the question of when to keep silent, and when to reveal.  Ultimately, here, it's not what you know, and it's not who you know -- it's what you know about who you know.  Each person has their own niche, their own web of intrigue, their own collection of only vaguely subsurface secrets.  And we're a city of poor secretkeepers.  Our large room is the meet up of a giant knitting circle.  Of course we've got cliques and subsets and genre communities, but they all knot up through one crossroads.  Perhaps it's my own bias, my vision that is limited by the scope of my profession, but there isn't a better position to be in to get to know that knitting circle and all its threads than in the service industry.  It's like a living local newspaper;  arts & entertainment, business, government -- what section do you want?  They all go out to eat.  They all go to the bar.  They all shuffle through some form of the service industry, and industry workers hear all, see all, and know all.  Or, at least some version of it. 

It's amazing, the things you can learn from what you hear in a large room.

I am just a fly on the wall.