This Week’s Guest: Nick Schiarizzi
How do you make friends as an adult? Without school to throw lots of people together in far greater combinations than a workplace, it's easy to feel stuck in the wrong group -- especially when other gays are hard to find. So my guest this week did something about that. Nick Schiarizzi is the co-founder of the brutally bizarre dance party Cheryl, where everyone comes expecting something weird and leaves having something even weirder. But you'd never guess it to look at him -- Nick is calm, deadpan, and for most of his life terrified to dance. But when he found himself feeling lonely and frustrated as a young adult, he decided to find a way to break through his inhibitions to he could finally find others like him.
Huge thanks to everyone who makes The Sewers of Paris possible with a pledge of a dollar or more a month on Patreon. There's rewards for folks who back the show -- just click "Support the Show on Patreon." Or you can support The Sewers of Paris for free by leaving a review on your podcast platform of choice -- that really helps people find the show.
BTW, I hope you'll join us for the next Sewers of Paris live chat. It's on Saturday September 29th at 2pm pacific. There's a link at the top of the Sewers of Paris twitter feed.
Head over to SewersOfParis.com to see clips of the stuff we talk about on each episode of the show. And for more queer podcasting, check out Queens Of Adventure to hear drag queens on an epic Dungeons & Dragons quest. That’s at QueensOfAdventure.com.
This Week’s Recommendation: Cheryl
Thanks again to Nick for joining me. I do heartily recommend those Cheryl parties. But if you're not in New York or a city where the party's on tour, you can experience a tiny taste of the next best thing by looking up their promo videos. Go to CherylWillRuinYourLife.info and click through the videos to find a lengthy collection spanning a decade of festive, colorful, and mystifying videos that capture the very strangest nocturnal queer culture that New York has to offer.
In those Cheryl videos you'll catch a glimpse of hundreds of people gathering together under cover of dark and buffeted by bass, dancing and partying and pushing boundaries for the sake of pushing boundaries. Sometimes art is meaningful, and other times the meaningless is the meaning. That, and kicking back to just enjoy yourself as extravagantly as possible while also spending as little money as possible. And what could be a more fundamental definition of queer culture than that?
So go -- watch some videos, get confused, get excited, and then find your way to creating something extremely peculiar of your own that definitely shouldn't exist, but does.