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InPittsburgh Article
Hi Culture | by Stephen H. Segal
SWINGIN' GEEKHOOD
She is a stylish, yuppie-aged Pittsburgher working to keep the city's social
scene alive, and she is deliberately, determinedly anonymous. Thanks to her
email address, she is known to over a thousand people citywide as the Party
Geek. To her way of thinking, though, that name isn't reserved for her alone --
all those who receive her weekly missives are party geeks. She calls herself,
simply, the Creator.
It was a year ago this week that she founded the Party Geek email list. At the
time, it was simply a clever device for playing God with a couple dozen single
acquaintances. "I have a lot of different groups of friends," she says, "and I
wanted to get them all together without letting them know it was doing it. I
guess you could say I wanted to throw a party, but didn't want to be
responsible for the success or failure of the party. "So from behind the
protective electronic cloak of creator@partygeek.com, she invited her various
social circles to come together for a pub crawl.
A bunch of them showed up. And the Creator got to thinking that maybe she had a
better idea here than she'd realized.
She began assembling a weekly compendium of "hot" social events happening around
town.
They were the sorts of things that would grab the attention of young
professionals who'd outgrown the same old bar scene: benefit shows, wine
tastings, art openings, outdoor festivals.
The kind of places where you'd meet people who'd consumed enough alcohol to be
cheerily relaxed but not so much that they'd be obnoxiously, drunkenly
propositioning you and all your companions at the same time.
Her friends started forwarding the email list to their friends. Soon friends of
the friends' friends were writing the Creator to ask if they could subscribe
too. A year (and two prominent annexed local email lists) later, the number of
registered party geeks has ballooned from 19 to 1,134.
What's most interesting about all this from a sociological standpoint isn't that
a thousand Pittsburghers enjoy the information the Creator is giving them. No,
it goes without saying that people like to party. What's interesting is the
evidence that, at long last, those to whom the word geek applies have stopped
tolerating it as an insult and, instead, fully co-opted it as a positive
descriptor.
"Geek refers to a person who sits in front of his or her computer all day,
contemplating, calculating and compiling data -- a very intelligent loner,"
defines the Creator. "A party geek is an intelligent person who enjoys
socializing in creative and playful environments. Computers, art and a great
glass of wine -- what more could you ask for?"
One thing the Party Geek list subscribers could ask for is a way to identify one
another. After all, the desire to meet potentially compatible single people is a
major reason for the list's existence; it would be nice to be able to use "Hey,
I'm a party geek too!" as an icebreaker. One idea the Creator is currently
discussing with a potential sponsor is to distribute pins with a Party Geek logo
to her followers, so they could wear them discreetly to events.
That logo? "A tortoise," she suggests, "with a martini glass. It's an oxymoron
-- just like party geek."
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