I identified some of the local people at the Cincinnati Diner en Blanc on my FB pages…(I work in the museum in the background in some of the photos) Upon reading the description of DEBS (which sounds cheesy)I felt suddenly strange and stranger. The spontaneity that may be there on outward appearances, gets drowned in the fact that people have to join a waiting list to even get considered for the next phases of becoming, what?–a member? I felt like I was reading about a 19th century secret society, complete with outfits. The wine has to be bought by a certain company, one can’t bring certain foods, and though people are acting on their own behalf, the whole thing looked like something out of a Victorian novel. That can be okay….but the eruptive fun is stolen by all the preparation, watching to see where the dinner will be held (always someplace chic and pretentiously full of prestige (why don’t they ever use a cornfield?). Everyone in the photos I saw of the Diner (about 100 of them) looked a little too genteel…a little too close to arrogant yuppie, or maybe they were.

I’d rather see the food go to a women’s shelter or children in despairing need for education or healthcare.
I’m a populist and will remain one.

Thank you.

$9 of that $50 went toward either the o.g. diner en blanc so philly could register as one officially/use its online resources/a permanent membership for each person for future diner en blanc’s. $50 was for this event. So there’s $4000, minus X volunteers’ money (did they get in free? i hope so considering what some of them did), minus the money for the band, the dj, the security guys (silly, but it got spent), the sparklers (ok, that probably wasn’t too expensive), the balloons, tokens for everyone, and a post-event clean up (because some trash just got piled up by the trash cans even though it wasn’t supposed to).

Yes, it was a lot of money to spend on a picnic. and maybe someone skimmed some/a lot off the top.

Bottomline, I did it because I was curious. And my fiancee and I spent a lot of time and money to do it. We weren’t sure that it was going to be worth it but it was a blast. As we walked to the fountain, we still weren’t sure that it wouldn’t be a complete bust. but the camraderie, the beauty of the event, the pop-up community, etc. It was a blast and well worth the time and money we spent on it. Were some people pretentious? shit yeah–hell, i brought some pretentious wine. but there were also people there enjoying mcdonald’s, enjoying a simple picnic of fresh food bought that day, etc. It was fun, and people hating on it really need to step back and come up with what, exactly, they hated. because it seems to me most of them just hated the fact that other people were doing something and they didn’t want to/couldn’t/wouldn’t go out and join them.

I’d prefer for it to have looked more like a cross-section of philly (though it was more racially diverse than the customer base of most of the high end restaurants that get talked about on this website…) and to have more of a political statement about what public spaces can and should be used for (events like this can highlight the opportunities public spaces offer and/or show off privileges not offered to everyone). But it was a first time and it has potential–anyone talking sh*t about it is missing the potential just to be even more pretentious by looking down their nose at it.