bcholmes | The Green Room (Reply)

So Friday night, the_siobhan and I went out to see a really bad play. While we were killing time, we decided to pop around to the Green Room for a coffee or sumpthin. The Green Room is a little place tucked down a back alley.

Flash back six years ago or so. The NetWits used to gather at the Green Room every Thursday night around nine or ten in the evening. On Thursdays, an adhoc group of Celtic musicians would jam in one corner of the space. And there was this big tall guy who'd do the Celtic "jump-up-and-down" dancing.

The Green Room was sometimes smokey. And often crowded. The place was full of chairs and couches that looked like they'd been rescued from someone's trash. We'd hover, like vultures, around anyone who inhabited our usual place.

There were a bunch of us. Diane and Sally who I knew from Stanley's <genuflect> creative writing class. Kevin and Gord mysteriously appeared on the Nanet's NA-WRITERS board. Which is also how I met Siobhan, although Diane had taken a theatre class with her.

Erin was one of Diane's finds. And Lydia was someone that Siobhan knew from pagan festivals.

I think that the NetWits had pretty much closed ranks against Janice by that point. And was Alex ever at the Green Room? Or had she faded away before it became a regular haunt?

I barely see any of those people now. I've had a few coffees with Diane and Sally recently. Gord was the one who sort of deliberately left the group, but I saw him briefly at Diane's book launch. Lydia was there, too, and was at Sally's book launch. Kevin, as far as I know, has fallen off the face of the earth.

For me, those were the days of the transition to poly. Heck, of the transition to transitioning.

And then things changed. We came in to the Green Room one night to discover a completely different staff working there. The place had changed hands, and the vibe disappeared overnight. The NetWits dispersed to the winds.

"Where are they all now"? I wondered aloud to Siobhan as we sat in a battered couch at the Green Room. The layout had changed. It's opened up quite a bit so the place seems more spacious. There's an outdoor courtyard area, now, that I don't have any recollection of. It's sparsely populated, and there were no Celtic musicians. They offered us a yuppie-chow menu, but their capuccino machine was broken. It was different. It was very different.

The next night, out of the blue, I got e-mail from Gord.