Blogher 10: Part Five: One Is The Loneliest Number

August 1997:

I'm at a legal convention in Arizona and my co-worker hops in a cab to go party with someone he went to law school with and I am in the middle of a group of five hundred people and I know nobody.

I went up to a group of women sitting at the onsite restaurant and asked if I could have drinks with them.  They said yes.

I caught the look they gave each other...a look of boredom, pity, and irritation.

We sat down and made polite conversation for about an hour and they excused themselves, disappearing into the night, and I crawled back to my room to read a trashy novel.

I swore then and there that I would never again attend a large convention without a group of friends to hang out with.  Thirteen years later.....

I went to Blogher.

I was miserable.

?

The location was wonderful.  That's Radio City Music Hall in the background.

I laughed a lot.

The people I met were all very nice, every single one of them.

I squealed like a fangirl when I met one of my favorite bloggers ever, Cecily.   She's gorgeous and just as real as she writes.

Yvonne was also just wonderful.  Here we are at the Cheeseburger party.

I got to go to a party sponsored by Edens Fantasys which had arts & crafts unlike things we see down heah in the Land O'Cotton.

The food was great and the people were just hilarious.

I got autographed by someone who just might be the most beautiful person I have ever laid eyes on.

Chookooloonks.  She is also known as Karen Walrond, author of The Beauty of Different and a recovering lawyer, just like me.  The only different is that she is famous and beautiful and African American.  Otherwise,  we're pretty much alike.

I got to go to Sparklecorn 10....

And it was the best cake I have ever tasted.

I got to meet Sweetney and Amalah, and since Amalah was the first blog I ever read, I again did my patented Southern fangirl squeal.

The party was huge and loud and the music was extremely danceable.   I danced.  See, here in the South, a room full of women dancing is unheard of.   We are so steeped in the Must Have Male Partner stuff that women who get out and shake their groove thang alone are looked upon as a. desperate b. extremely drunk or c. both desperate and extremely drunk.

I called home.

"I'M AT A PARTY WITH A BILLION WOMEN DANCING AND I DON'T HAVE TO LOOK AT YOU WITH PITIFUL LOST PUPPY DOG EYES PLYING YOU WITH INTOXICATING DRINKS IN A FUTILE EFFORT TO GET YOU TO DANCE WITH ME," I screamed joyfully into the phone at Roger, 800 miles away with his feet up in his easy chair watching someone hit a ball at somebody else.   He was happy, and so was I.

So...what's the problem?  Please refer to the title of my blog, Clueless in Carolina.

I arrived at the festivities thirteen years after that gruesome meal in Arizona with the innocent but quite mistaken belief that I had developed such a fabulous personality at my advanced age that I could instantly find a group of women who would cling to me like leeches in the swamps surrounding Columbia and we would all have fun together.  Didn't happen.

It's nobody's fault.

There were a million billion things going on and everybody was trying to talk to everybody and do everything and go everywhere.    My friend Jenny, the one and the only Goddess, I mean Bloggess,  described it perfectly, "it was like we were floating in an ocean."  She told me that she barely got a chance to talk to people she's known for years.  It was sensory overload.

I struck up conversations with complete strangers who were friendly but then drifted away to be with people they knew.

I didn't have a posse.    I wasn't staying at the hotel because I love my family couldn't afford it and couldn't stay all day at Blogher because I was too busy partying all over town sleeping due to fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome.

So it wasn't Blogher's fault.  The convention was filled with interesting, cool, funny, creative, fabulous women.   Blogher did a great job planning and presenting a convention for two thousand women.  

Would I go again?  Heck yeah, in a second.  (shrug).   I didn't leave the convention weeping and rending my garments.  In fact,  in one of those delicious twists of irony I stepped outside at midnight to hail a taxi and struck up a conversation with two total strangers.  1 1/2 hours later, we took each other's names and said goodbye.  It was one of those epic College Roommate Midnight Dialogues.

But I will never go alone again.