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When Greek Night Meets Reality December 6, 2004 Always good for a laugh at a Greek Night is watching the non-Greeks who happen to unknowingly wander into the party from another part of the club. You can’t blame these folks when it happens at some Greek Nights, when the Greek Night isn’t the only event at the club, Greek music isn’t the only thing playing, and that Greek music is sounding more like everything else playing at clubs these days. It’s rare though when the people who wander into these Greek Nights overshadow or should overshadow the entire event. Picture the scene. Thanksgiving night, 10:30, a Greek/International night at a club downtown. It was too early for more than a handful of Greeks to have arrived, despite the open bar until 11:00. The room though was full because many of the people from the first floor of the club wandered two floors up to see what was happening in the private VIP area. A guy walked in who looked out of place, not only for a Greek/International Night, but for late November as well, wearing a pink polo shirt. I joked to my brother that it was one of the cast members from this season’s, The Apprentice. He looked like Kevin, the law student from Chicago. A minute later, a girl who looked like Ivana, the Venture Capitalist from Boston walked in. This time it was my brother who was the first to make a joke that it another cast member from the show. At this point we started to take the joke more seriously. It wasn’t until another girl walked in who looked like Sandy, the Bridal Salon owner from Rockville, MD, and a photographer who was in the club took a picture of the three of them, that we realized that it really was three cast members from The Apprentice. It probably helped that we had just finished watching an episode of The Apprentice with the three of them in it before going out to Greek Night. We asked ourselves what these three were accidentally doing at a Greek Night. You know you’ve been going to Greek Nights too long when you don’t know the reputation of a club or restaurant as anything other than what it is as a Greek Night. (It took a Third Thursday at Tuscana West a few years ago to make us realize for example that it wasn’t just a club called Diva that we went to once a month for Greek Night.) We didn’t think this club was anything too special that would merit a cameo appearance from not one but three celebrities. We didn’t realize at the time that Sandy was from the DC area and that Kevin grew up in Silver Spring, which would have answered our next question – what were three reality TV stars doing at a club in DC on Thanksgiving Night? We quickly realized that we were the only ones in the club, particularly the only Greeks who realized who these people were. Maybe Greeks don’t watch reality television, or this particular show, or celebrity doesn’t impress them enough to pick up their cell phones to call the rest of their friends to tell them to show up. That can’t be entirely true though because we remember a few years ago at Acropolis when the rumor of Ricky Martin and Gloria Estefan in the VIP section was enough to pack a Greek Night on the main level of the club. Did the DJ realize that there were celebrities dancing to his mix? Probably not. We would have most likely given a shout out to these folks if he had. If he had realized it, we wished he would have gone all Greek the whole time, the kind of Greek music where you can’t pass with your normal club dance moves. The funniest part of this whole experience is that my brother, a.k.a. Camera Guy, actually had an “in” to talking to Ivana due to both of them having attended the same undergraduate business program and had a mutual friend through that connection as well. (We thought that her having gone to school a couple of hours from here was their reason for being in the area.) The normally shameless Camera Guy who has no problem approaching Greeks he doesn’t even know in DC and elsewhere and taking their pictures, was virtually paralyzed with the prospect of approaching this girl. He wasn’t going to do the normal, “Oh my God I’m such a fan, can I get your autograph, picture, etc.” routine. The camera was secure in its holster and it wasn’t coming out for any reason in this exchange, with the fear of getting sued by The Donald or The Peacock for posting their picture looming. (NBC would probably then find out that we didn’t like their Olympic coverage.) After wrestling with the approach for a while, he finally found an opportunity when she wasn’t surrounded by her entourage to talk to her. Poor girl had just finished fiddling with a loose contact lens and was even more thrown off when Camera Guy brought up the school connection first and not her celebrity status. He wasn’t rude enough to not acknowledge her celebrity at all, but starting it the other way probably led to a more genuine interaction. A minute later her and the rest of the cast were pretty much out the door and into a limo which left a few minutes later. We left a few minutes later as well, seeing two other Greeks coming in as we were living, who would have oblivious to the fact that for a few minutes, this Greek Night was any different from the others.
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