“When I got to DC, I knew no one. At the time, I had a boyfriend who lived in LA, such a bad idea. I spent a year traveling back and forth and not giving DC a chance at all, just meeting a person here and there. Then, I broke up with my boyfriend and I decided to focus and really like DC and make it mine. I always used to take pictures and write stories on MySpace, basically narrating what was going on around town. My site really grew and I started getting 500 people a day or so checking out my photos. And, all of these people would come up to me and say, “Hey, you’re that girl who does those pictures.”
“So, my friend, Jason, suggested that we put the website out into the larger world. In 2006, we converted my site into a shitty blog and called it Brightest Young Things. I always wanted to call the blog that after Evelyn Waugh's novel, Vile Bodies. I wanted the name to be funny. The book talks about all of these kids running through London in the 1920's and they have nothing, but partying and live a very superficial life. In the book, they call those kids bright young things. Some people get the joke and some people don’t.
“Right now, our traffic is about 100,000 visitors a month. Sometimes, upwards of 10,000 a day. Now, we have 30 photographers, 60 contributors, and it’s a tight group of friends. So, we just went full-time in July. In the future, we are going to do more festivals and things that take over whole neighborhoods, especially parts of the city that many people don’t normally think of.
“I think that the parties we throw couldn’t happen in any place but DC. DC is an exceptionally smart city and its, like, a conquerable city so there is a sense of familiarity and everyone knows everyone. If you give people a chance to have fun and do something different and creative here, of course everyone is going to jump at it. To think that I needed something to do to avoid thinking about my breakup and now I have BYT, it’s pretty awesome. “
Brightest Young Things is organizing The Bentzen Ball, a comedy festival, this weekend. Get tickets here.
2 comments:
Killer breakup story!
Post a Comment