I haven’t had a post since that melancholic night out at the Roost. Guess it’s time for an update…
Interesting things happen from inside of a community setting.
I’ve been a semi-active member of the BDSM/Leather community for some time now and attending some of the events, clubs and munches can be an eye opener sometime.
Recently my partner and I have volunteered to do the setup/teardown for a monthly play party that’s open to a good chunk of the community (well it’s not totally open, you have to have a reference of good standing who is already a ‘member’ of the play party to get in but if you’ve attended any munches or are a member of any of the local clubs you will almost certainly know someone who can take you along). Setup involves turning up a few hours early, unloading a trailer full of furniture equipment (St. Andrews Cross/Scaffolding all the way to the sound system). For a couple of people this is a fair amount of work! We tagged along last Saturday to get our “induction” as to how this is done. I was pleased to see the number of people who turned up to help out who, technically speaking, had no responsibility to do so. Awesome! We were setup in about 45 minutes which, given the amount of equipmente and setup involved, was quite remarkable.
Tear down took no time at all either as after the music stopped plenty of folks were around to make teardown and cleanup a whiz. Really good to see. I think kudos are in order for all the folks who helped out! Thank you!!
The party itself was also justification that our community needs events like this to help it thrive. It’s held in a small community hall and there were a total of 79 people who turned up (I worked the door for a bit and did a quick count of the waiver forms that were filled out by people as they came in). Given the size of the venue it was pretty packed.
Just looking around and watching people go about their evening brings me to the really interesting feature of communities like this. The demographics covered pretty much all walks of life and the different kinks, playstyles and preferences displayed covered much of the spectrum too. I spent some time DM’ing the party so this always gives an opportunity to learn new things when you get to watch people who you have not seen play before. Some of the newbies that were out were quite taken with some of the play going on and had a chance to get a bit of a taster too. There was even another crossdresser there so I’m not the only one (although I was not dressed that night as I did not know what was involved with the setup/teardown or how much time would be left for getting changed… as it turns out I would have had plenty!).
Overall a good and educational evening and you leave with a good feeling knowing you helped to make others people’s night out a good one.
As an aside I would like to post more regularly but I’m always interested in others peoples ideas on things that I may be interested in or know something about (crossdressing, play, whatever). If you have anything you’d like to see me write about leave a comment and I’ll see if I can do that! If nothing else it may give me an incentive to post more often. Sometimes it’s hard to come up with topics to discuss and without comments left it’s hard to know what kind of an impact you leave on your readership (if any!).
