Crockpot & Criterion: On not being alone
Our little community-building project.
Americans now spend an average of 99 more minutes at home each day than they did in 2003, while this generation of 15 to 24 year olds spends 124 more minutes at home than their counterparts two decades ago. Meanwhile, just 30 percent of Americans spent time socializing and communicating in person on an average day, down from 38 percent in 2014, according to the American Time Use Survey.
I suspect such increasing isolation is both cause and result of our disordered politics. But I’m not here to talk about that. Instead, I want to tell you about a little community-building project my wife and I have recently undertaken.
It’s called “Crockpot & Criterion.”
The weekly gathering started almost by accident. We don’t have a bundle of streaming services — we turn off one before we start another subscription — but one service we always have is Criterion Channel, a curated collection of classic movies, arthouse films and foreign flicks. It’s great.
We haven’t always gotten the best use of it though. So in June, I suggested to my wife that we designated Monday night — always kind of a bummer evening at the beginning of the week, but also a night she has off from work — as Criterion night.
And then we thought: Why don’t we have friends over?
Let me back up here: This is possible mainly because Liberty Hall, my local arthouse theater, last year started up a “movie club” to bring together folks who enjoy its programming. I’ve met a few folks whose company — often at the movies, natch — I’ve come to really enjoy.
So we invited a few of them over. We sent out a list of movies we’d be watching over the course of the month. And we promised them a free vegetarian meal1 while we watched the movie of the week in our cramped little living room.
We started with “Splendor in the Grass,” a movie about two kids in southeast Kansas going insane with sexual repression. We moved onto a documentary about the artist Hilma af Klint. Last week we watched “Basquiat.”
Here’s the thing: I thought folks would show up for a week. Maybe two. And then the whole thing would peter out.
That’s not what has happened.
We had our biggest group yet on Monday night — even though we were missing two regulars — for a viewing of Sammo Hung’s “Encounters of the Spooky Kind.”
It was fantastic.
I am not going to pretend that we’re doing something world-changing here. But I do believe that the best steps toward creating the world you want, the community you want, are often small ones. Go to breakfast. Invite them over for a movie. Sit in a coffee shop so many days in a row that you get to know the other regulars by osmosis. Do something you enjoy and try to do it with at least one other person.
Maybe “Crockpot & Criterion” will peter out in the future. Everything has its season, after all. For now, though, it’s an oasis of togetherness at a fraught moment. I am grateful for it.
My wife does the cooking for this, I should admit. The “crockpot” part was born of trying to keep the labor to a minimum, though I should say having a weekly event is a great way to make sure you keep your living room clean.
Something I don't get into: I went into a Mennonite college, where drinking and premarital sex were against the rules. (I know, I know. I've changed.) So one of the ways we entertained ourselves was to take over a common room and watch movies together. It was the way I learned to socialize.
This is a wonderful idea, Joel, and frankly an inspiration to me; Melissa and I were never deeply social, but we did, at one time, have at least semi-regular gatherings with friends at our house (and since, like you, I was raised it--and still at least partly adhere to--a religiously conservative environment, hanging out without drinks but with food, movies, murder mystery games, etc., was pretty normalized), and I've thought for a while that we really need to get back to that, especially now with the house emptier than ever. I appreciate learning about this encouraging example; I hope you can keep it up!