Alpha
2 min
Eight Wednesdays. Over 170 young adults registered, every one of them between 19 and 39. Dinner first, always.
Eight Wednesdays at Sts. Peter and Paul. Over 170 young adults registered, every one of them between 19 and 39, which is the part people ask us to repeat when we say it out loud.
The shape of the night never changed, and that was deliberate. Dinner first, at a table with the same faces every week. Then something to watch. Then the rest of the evening is the table talking about what it just watched.
Nobody gets put on the spot. There is no right answer you are supposed to arrive at and no wrong one that gets corrected, which is the whole point of doing it this way. One week the question on the screen was: what is the best news you ever got? People answered that. Then they kept going long after they were asked to stop.
Tables were grouped by age, so you were sitting with people in roughly your own season. Nineteen-year-olds working out first jobs at one table. People in their late thirties working out marriages and mortgages at another. It sounds like a small piece of admin. It is the reason the conversations went anywhere.
The last night landed in December, so the hall went red, the tree went up, and everybody turned out in the sweaters. The food did not stop. It was the loudest the room had been in eight weeks.
That is what eight weeks does. On the first night people arrive early and sit quietly. By the last one you cannot get them to go home.
