A Nice Guy Has Entered the Chat
One man's punny protest against our local social media's turn towards negativity. PLUS: Everything that went down at our last singles party.
Tweet Others the Way You Want to be Tweeted
When Meta’s Threads platform launched this week to “copy and crush” Elon Musk’s Twitter, social media users the world over wondered if this just might be the “Twitter end” (too cringey? you’ll forgive me if you keep reading) to their OG sharing app. Closer to home, keyboard warriors’ social media queries were more like: “When did What’s Going on Saratoga? get so mean?”
How did members of our local Facebook group weather the storm of vaccine politics only to sharpen their knives when it was all over?
Recently, seemingly innocuous posts asking for Skidmore info or where to grab an early breakfast sandwich have elicited spiteful, personal attacks. One tangent spat on the Skidmore post read, “I think they admit people with positive attitudes,” which garnered a reply of, “Good thing you don’t get paid to ‘think.’” A few days prior, the egg sandwich recommendation post wildly spun out into bickering such as “my previous comment of you graduating high-school, I must’ve been wrong.” [sic]
Meanwhile, over on the Nextdoor app, things are a whole lot lighter and…punnier.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Dan McConville’s above post about a musical hit job recently went viral (by local social media standards).
In the comments, no one (and by that I mean, “zero people”) cared about grammar, or lashing out, or politics, or anything—except crafting the perfect, punny response.
“Any word on who conducted this?” “Will have to get Bach to you on that.” “in a Minuet?”
Neighbors playing off neighbors, good-naturedly? I couldn’t get enough.
“Cello? Any updates on who did this?”
”I really harp they catch who did this!”
“Did they knock you flat?”
“The only thing I heard was one of them tell the others ‘hurry up and guitar stuff and let’s get out of here.”
“If we could only live in harmony…”
As it turns out, Dan has been posting Dad jokes going back to the beginning of the year. (His debut pun? “Where do rainbows go when they are bad? Prism.”)
The online pun-meister is a 57-year-old Luther Forest resident and the grounds manager at the College of St. Rose. He is also a certified college and high school softball umpire—and a man of few words when talking about subjects more personal than people-movers (“My friend loves his new Stair Lift, but mine is slowly driving me up the wall”) and fitness (“Every morning I announce to my family that I’m going jogging, but then I don’t go. It’s a running joke.”)
In a nutshell, Dan would love it if people would lighten up already. And so he posts jokes he finds on Twitter and elsewhere, a veritable punny port in a storm of online quarreling. “I thought people would like them,” he says. “I find them amusing and thought other people would also. I did notice a lot of negativity on the Nextdoor page, so I try to keep it light.”
Was Dan in any way bewildered that of all the Dad jokes he’s curated, this one about a feisty French horn and violin is the one that landed? “I am surprised,” he says. “But I like it.”
So do we.
—Abby
Single in Saratoga: Opera Edition
If you thought the opera was something you went to with your husband or wife, think again. Last Friday, Saratoga Living and Opera Saratoga teamed up to transform the meaning of “a night at the opera” with a singles night mixer hosted before the evening’s showing of Don Pasquale. (It was almost too perfect—the comedic Italian opera can be described as a “rom-com” with a dose of catfishing.)
Attendees of all ages—some longtime opera fans but mostly first-timers—congregated in the intimate chapel room at Universal Preservation Hall for complimentary wine and Prosecco by Freixenet and charcuterie by Saratoga Grazing Co. (Several Opera Saratoga performers also made star appearances!) One woman from Glens Falls said she’d come to the opera the week before and, fed up with dating app Bumble, convinced her friend to come out for Single in Saratoga. She ended up winning the evening’s rom-com trivia contest, correctly answering an impressive 11 out of 12 questions on movies ranging from 1954’s Sabrina to 2017’s Home Again. “Did she cheat?” I asked her friend (most of the other attendees got two or three right). “No,” she said jokingly. “She’s just old.”
There were two newbies to town (they exchanged numbers), a son of an opera Board member who admitted to never having been to the opera, and the daughter of a couple who retired to Saratoga after decades of working in NYC.
Another woman has been trying to get her friend out to a Saratoga Living singles night, and was finally able to under the guise of going to the opera. While they spent most of the time chatting with me (I ended up knowing the friend), she wasn’t shy about trying to set Opera Saratoga Administrative Associate Sasha Gusikhin up with her 20-year-old son, who also happens to be an opera fan. “He would love her,” she told me.
Did anyone find love? Maybe, maybe not. Were friends made and new art forms explored? Absolutely.
See more photos of the night by Zach Skowronek here:
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