Private Party or Everyone Welcome?

This past week and weekend, Nashville hosted the Americana Music Festival. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights were filled with singers and bands playing 45 minute sets back-to-back in different clubs throughout the city. The friends I’d invited to go with me bailed on me (with legitimate excuses, but still) so I made my pilgrimage alone.

Now, most of the clubs don’t have enough seating for all the music devotees to sit in. Only a few people who arrived when the doors opened are in the coveted seats.

So, each time I entered a club, I sized up the room’s vacancies, looking for a table with an open seat. I’ve found that I can often crash a table when I’m taking in music by myself. A couple or maybe three people will be at a table with a 4th vacant chair. Getting my guts up, I’ll approach in-between songs, indicate the free chair and ask, “Is anyone sitting here?”, followed by, “Could I join you?” Each time, the group at the table let me sit down. But, as I did this night after night this week, I found that there are two kinds of parties out there. There are the “Private Parties” kind and there are the “Everyone is Welcome” kind.

I lucked out and mostly ran into “everyone is welcome” tables. The best example of this was on Saturday night at my favorite Nashville music venue, 3rd and Lindsley. I went to hear Austin favorite Eliza Gilkyson. The room wasn’t crowded yet when I arrived, and I quickly spotted a table for six that only had one couple sitting at it. I smiled and asked if I could sit with them, and they quickly and generously said yes. Two guys who were behind me saw what I had done, and they asked the couple if they could join us, too. “Sure!”, they said, smiling and introducing themselves, confident that we were good people if we were there to hear Eliza. And they were right! We enjoyed the show with a sense of camaraderie and chatting between songs. We all felt comfortable and easy together, as if we were new friends, not mere passing acquaintances. (By the way, Eliza was lovely and amazing.)

Now and then, however, I would run into “private parties.” One night, I visited The Basement. I had a knock-out evening when I went earlier in the week, rooted by the passion of David Olney’s oration of Samuel Coleridge’s epic poem, “Kubla Khan”, entertained by Amelia White and her band (dressed up in funky retro duds in honor of Halloween), mesmerized and delighted by Paul Burch and the WPA Ballclub (really, check them out - they were my best find over the week), and energized by Sarah Borges and the Broken Singles (Sarah could be a stunt woman with all her hijinks on the stage).

Off to the side of the stage was a table of three and one chair was sitting sadly unused, even though there was quite a crowd already in the room. During a break between bands, I went over and asked if they were using the extra chair. They indicated that I could take it, and it was clear that they thought I was going to carry the thing to some unknown area in the room and set myself up. But I wasn’t planning to do that. For one thing, the crowd wouldn’t have taken kindly to me running around heaving a heavy iron chair around until I found an empty square foot of room where I could somehow see anything. No, I simply pulled the chair a little back from their table to give them their space, and sat down.

As the next band set up, played, removed their equipment, and the next band set up, played, and removed their equipment, our table would have been an interesting social experiment on film. There were 2 or 3 empty beer bottles per person on the table when I sat down. Quickly, 2 more beers for the couple and 2 hard liquor drinks for the 3rd member of the party followed. The couple studiously avoided looking at me, acknowledging me, or much less talking to me. I was clearly not part of their “party,” and may as well have been a pillar holding up the roof. The third member, a shabby-on-purpose and carefully put together, attractive guy in his 20s, smiled at me, made a few comments and side jokes to me. He was willing to be an “everyone welcome” kind of guy, but his cultivated and increasingly drunk friends weren’t interested in expanding their circle. They also didn’t seem that interested in the music. I think they were just there to feel cool and show off how good looking they were and how into each other they were. I felt bad for the odd guy out, because they really didn’t seem to include him on much either.

So after two somewhat nondescript bands played, and after bearing with the awkward position that the group’s non-welcoming behavior had placed me in for over two hours, I opted to go home.

In contrast, after cheering Eliza on at 3rd and Lindsley, it turned out that the 2 guys who sat down after me were headed to another venue that I wanted to go to as well, and we ended up hanging out the rest of the night, really having a great time together. They invited me to a show they were playing with their band, One Horse Town, at the Bluebird the next night, and when I went, I was as proud for them as if they were old friends, and they were so happy that I’d come. (Meet my new friends, Daniel and Stuart, with me at the Blue Bird Cafe.)

I experienced the warmth and friendliness of strangers who were willing to be open, curious, and kind to someone they’d never met, and the coldness and exile of strangers who kept themselves tightly coiled in their own protective circle, not allowing anyone else in. As I thought over the week, I was reminded of a research study that showed that people who “exercised” their brains regularly by learning new things and being exposed to new situations were less likely to be affected by dementia in the last years of life. So, welcome new friends…