Southern Anecdotal Moment

So I just had one of my weirder cultural (if you will) experiences tonight.

A little background information: Columbia's downtown isn't the most happening of downtowns, nor is it by far the most happening part of Columbia. Not by a long shot. And some blocks even less.
Tonight, I happened about this block. It's the only retail block in downtown (the rest are mostly food and lawyers, etc), and it contains ethnic sorts of stores and wig shops. Yeah.

Now that you have the visual, let me explain why I was there. I'm in an art house film class, where we go to Columbia's art house film theater on Thursday nights and watch a film, talk about it for 45 min, then go home and write a little paper on it. (And we learn about film and non-profit organizations.) In a year and a half it will be moving into a much bigger theater 5 blocks away. Right now, however, unless you are more than, say 45 years old, you would not know the building is a theater. It is atop a building called Solid Gold Beauty Supply (guess what it sells? Asian wigs. I know). Suffice it to say, right now the owner of the Nick, or teacher Larry, is the only white guy who is seen hanging out on that block. Till tonight.

For the sake of learning more about the art house film industry, my class was to forgo a film (super sad day; I thought we were watching Persepolis) and take a tour of the new home. Our prof was to meet us there at 6pm, and, as good students we are, most of us were early. Josh kindly dropped me off, or rather, waited with me so I wouldn't have to stand there alone looking ... awkward. Pretty soon I saw an uncomfortable looking white girl walk up and stand uncertainly in front of a jewelry store, next to Solid Gold Beauty Supply. The, two equally awkward looking white guys joined her. Convinced it was my class, I also joined them. Pretty soon we were a group of about 10 white kids with backpacks trying to look natural in front of a jewelry store.

Pretty soon, an African American security guy walks up and asks us what we are doing there. (Needless to say we looked out of place.) We all laughed uncomfortably, and then one guy piped up and said we were looking for the new home of the Nickelodeon. The man laughed and said we had found it, and then added that it wasn't too often that he saw people... looking like us loitering on that block. We all felt a little weird and then just embraced the humor (the security man certainly had - he thought it was hilarious), and we laughed.

And then Larry showed up and we were all a little relieved.