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Come Together
MeetinDC's Mikey Herd founded the social group four years ago to "create an environment where everyone's invited," he says. An anniversary party at his Alexandria home drew about 200 members, including Maria Robertson, from left, Charann White and Annette Delallana, shown with Herd.
(Mark Finkenstaedt Ftwp - Mark Finkenstaedt)
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Washington can be a tricky place to do that, unless half your graduating class ended up here or you're instantly enamored with a super-fun set of fellow law firm associates. There's the transience and the workaholism, the ladder-climbing and the I'm-only-gonna-be-here-a-few-years-so-I-don't-need-to-plant-roots mentality.
And then there's one too many lonely nights in an over-air-conditioned high-rise. Which maybe leads to the Internet -- Google or Craigslist or some neighborhood bulletin board -- and a few hundred notices of people looking for salsa partners. Fellow art lovers. Kickball enthusiasts. Book snobs. Outdoorsy women. Concertgoers.
Hey, anyone just want to go to dinner?
And like everything else, there's a club for that. Some of the groups are big and general, unabashedly focused on networking. Others are small, more select and specific, couched in a targeted interest or activity. But all of them, really, are about branching out. Getting out.
Maybe even finding, like Connolly did, "the best sphere of friends I've ever had in my life."
* * *
Seattle. That's what happened to Connolly's social life.
His best buddy, who drove most of their weekend plans and almost always was around for a good time, took a job in Seattle.
"I realized he was the core of my social life, and I was like, 'Huh. I need to break out,' " Connolly recalls, standing in front of an indoor rock-climbing gym in Alexandria. "I decided the best way to do that was to dive in a car with a bunch of people I didn't know."
And he means that.
A few years ago, after that friend moved, Connolly, who works as an environmental consultant, found a group on the Internet that was organizing a trip to an Oktoberfest celebration in Towson. He signed up and got in the car with a bunch of strangers, thinking that by the end of the day he would either have a new set of friends or be ready to book a one-way ticket to Seattle.
He has been a regular at MeetinDC events ever since.
