It took some doing. I put some notices out on the New York section of the "Meeting Place" board on Daily Diapers and in the AB/DL's in New York/New Jersey group on DiaperSpace. Slowly, the responses came in. Once I had six volunteers, we started discussing dates. It took a while to reach a consensus, but it seemed like the first Sunday in June would be good for everyone. It took until two days before that date to decide this though, and last minute conflicts were basically guaranteed to crop up. We had enough people though that even if half of them didn't show up it would still be enough for a reasonably-sized meet-up. Anyway, my girlfriend was out of town and I was bored. I emailed everyone my cell phone number and told them to call me when they got to Penn Station. That was our meeting spot, since we had people on the list who were commuting all the way from Connecticut and Jersey.
Well, Sunday, June 7th arrived and I rode the train up to Penn Station. When 3 PM (our scheduled meeting time) arrived, I got a call.
"Hey, this is Nicole, from ... the group."
Awesome. Someone had shown up.
"Hey," I replied, "great, you made it. I'm at 34th street. Where are you?"
"I'm by the K-Mart," she replied.
"Great. I'll meet you there."
I walked down 34th street until I saw the K-Mart sign and called Nicole back.
"Hey," I said. "I'm at the K-Mart. I'm waving."
Coming through the crowd, I spotted a redhead waving back. This was it! My first meeting with another diaper lover. We shook hands and introduced ourselves properly.
"So," she asked, "how long have you been into ... diapers?"
"Um," I said. "Basically since I was little. Since I can remember."
It was such an unusual sensation to just be having a discussion like this in the middle of a crowded street. It's like F. Scott Fitzgerald says though; large parties are the most private, and New York is the biggest party of all.
As it turned out, this wasn't Nicole's first meeting. She had met five or six other people in the area who were into diapers. She explained that she had grown tired of reading the same kinds of posts over and over again on internet message boards and that she hardly even visited them any more except to get in contact with people in the New York area. She had had one bad experience meeting with a guy who turned out to be a total creep who enjoyed sending weird text-messages, but she had had her share of good encounters too.
After about half an hour of standing around in front of K-Mart, we realized that we were probably the only ones coming. We started walking and ended up on the Lower East Side, where we decided to grab a bite to eat.
Over lunchtime conversation, I found out that she had known two other DLs at the small college she attended upstate. One of them she met through a message board and had some play with. He told her there was at least one other DL at their school that he knew of, but he wouldn't divulage the name. Later she found out that the mystery DL was someone she had spent an entire summer working side by side with. Coincidence? I guess so, but my guess is that there are more of us out there than anybody realizes. I told her about DLightning's blog and how he had this symbol that looked like an inconspicuous designer logo that he was making plans to promote. She agreed that it was a good plan. If she or her co-worker had had something like that to identify themselves as a diaper lover, it certainly would have made lunch hour conversation more interesting.
In addition to diaper stuff, we talked about movies, literature, living situations in New York, and all kinds of other things. It was a good experience to be able to just talk about being into diapers as a normal, everyday issue ... because for a lot of people it totally is. We just have to create opportunities like this where we can meet and find out just how normal it is.
In any case, we both agreed that we'd like to do this again to give everyone who didn't make it this time around an opportunity to attend a real life gather of diaper lovers. She suggested it might be fun to do a picnic in central park next time.
As I've said before, any of you teens/twenty-somethings in the area who are interested in participating should shoot me an email at diapermail@yahoo.com ... and if our group isn't near you in NYC, don't be afraid to put yourself out there and start getting together a meet-up in your own town. Remember: use common sense. One on one meetings with internet-strangers in private places are a bad plan, kids. A good meet-up should be held in a public place where everyone is going to be comfortable. Don't get discouraged if responses are slow, and keep gathering those emails until you have a good sized group that is close in age. And remember ... if you do hold a meet-up in your area, we want to hear how it went! Write a blog about it, or at least comment here so everyone in our group can hear about how other people are organizing. Who knows ... if we get enough groups together and keep in touch, DLs sometime down the line might be able to visit each other's groups if they find themselves traveling with some time to kill.
Anything's possible ...
