(This is how we explained the event, back in 2001)
What on Earth is Troll's Night Out?
"Trolls' Night Out" was conceived of a few years back, after a string of unpleasantly odd experiences at "Pagans Night Out" and similar events, back in the waning years of the 1990s. What I had encountered was a group of people who had taken themselves so seriously for so long, in such a humorless and dogmatic fashion, that they had literally gone insane - and the crazies were scaring everybody else off.
"Troll's Night Out" is the OTHER Pagans' Night Out. It's for the rest of us. The ones the crazies and the fanatics drove off.
The way it works is this: sometimes, an event will be publicly announced. That's good for bringing fresh blood into the group, as it forms. More often that not, it won't be, though. Most of the events will be announced on our mailing lists. (One over at Onelist/eGroups/Yahoo/Whoever ends up taking over Yahoo, and the other at CoolList). Yes, I know some people don't have e-mail. We'll also keep a list of phone numbers handy, and maybe be looking for volunteers to call around, to make sure that people get the word.
Let's say, that somebody who comes by, becomes a problem. The solution is simple. We just don't invite him any more, or tell him where the next event will be, and he will be removed from our lists. For good measure, when somebody is banned, his (or her) name will be placed on a list of those no longer welcome here.
Suppose that somebody calls somebody on the list, and says, "hey, I can't log in, could you tell me when the next meeting is?'. I'm not going to be this rigid tyrant and say that a list member couldn't ever be a nice guy and tell him. But, before he tells his friends when and where we are meeting, he is required to check the list of banned individuals, before he gives out that time and location information. NO EXCEPTIONS. And no excuses. Giving that information to somebody who has been banned, gets one banned oneself.
Sometimes we'll be meeting at "Storytime". It's a nice event. Most of the time, we won't be, though. That's the point. We keep the troublemakers away, by keeping them guessing. One time, we're in one place, another time we're in another. None of this "we're at such and such place, on every third friday" business.
My job as the moderator is to be a benevolent dictator and maintain that list. If somebody is being a problem, come to me. If I'm convinced that somebody really is being obnoxious, he'll be asked to leave. Even if he insists on staying and we are in a public place, he won't be hearing about most of the future public gatherings.
Right now, this should work, because we're too small for some of the more prominent troublemakers in the community to care. Of course, the time might come when there are so many people playing the "Wiccan civil disobedience game" and defiantly passing the word along to those on the banned list, in order to prove - God knows what. If that time comes, and I find that I can no longer keep up with the leaks, I'll just break down, rent a private room and require reservations and pre-payment to cover one's share of the rental expenses.
I'm hoping that such a time doesn't come soon. Yes, it gets expensive ($5 per person, or more, is typical), which drives people off, especially if they come on a slow night and feel that they didn't get their money's worth. It also changes the whole feel of the event. It feels less open. It cuts us off from the larger community around us, and eliminates the possibility that we'll be pleasantly surprised by who overhears out conversation and decides to drop in. How often we forget, that this kind of comfortable spontaneity used to be one of the things that people came to the city to find.
But, we'll do what we have to.
One thing that ALL of our public meetings will have in common, at least as we see it now, is that, like that first night at "Storytime", they will center around some event. It's going to be an event that you have a chance to participate in. Usually, something creative, and possibly PLEASANTLY strange (if something occurs to us). The sort of thing that we'll have fun at, and the professionally grumpy will want to flee from.
We like doing it this way, for a few reasons. It is a sort of insurance for somebody who is thinking of dropping by. Maybe she's looking at one of our ads, and thinking, "I'm going to travel all of this way. I'll get there, nobody's going to know anybody, and we'll just stare at each other. I'll get depressed, leave, and the whole trip will be wasted". Centering the evening around an event is our way of saying "We understand that concern, we've had that experience ourselves, but no matter what happens, your trip won't have been wasted. At the very least, you can enjoy the event.
Doing the event this way, also does something for the spirit of the evening. It gives us something to start talking about. For example, let's say we're meeting at a fiction or poetry reading event. If we're at one of those, it means one of two things. Either it is an open mike, or one of us is one of the invited readers. If it's an open mike, you can already picture people nervously ruffling through their papers, trying out a reading or two on the people around the table, asking them "who does this sound?", or "is this better?", offering suggestions, talking about what they were thinking about as they wrote it ...
The ice will be instantly broken. People will already be talking to each other. Once a gathering is at that point, it has already passed its greatest hurdle.
If one or more of us should happen to be invited readers, that may be even better.
Note, added 2003, updated June 2004 : As you may have guessed, given the fact that I'm giving you a fake name for the event, all did not turn out well.
We can't recommend the place we used to go as enthusiastically as we once did, owing to a bizarre incident on their home mailing list. We had heard a rumor that a small press was going bankrupt. But, before we did something that might possibly get the rumor mill going in earnest (and do real damage to that small company), we wanted to make sure that we knew what we were talking about. Knowing that there were a number of published authors on the list, one of us asked them how one would confirm the truth of something like that.
One of the members of the list demanded that we post the name of the company in question on the list which, by the way had (and has) publicly accessible archives. Our member asked her if he could tell her by private e-mail. No, she replied angrily, repeating her demand. The whole thing then escalated into a mass trolling by the regulars on the list, with the people in charge all too glad to join in. Finding that we were being crucified for having done the right thing, we unsubscribed from the list and haven't been back to "Storytime" since. Nor will we go back again. Nor do we recommend that you do so at all.
The frustrating thing? It had been a really good time, and we have reason to suspect that our decision to use it for Pagan networking purposes helped ruin it for ourselves and others, by bringing in some of the very people who were making trouble that day. We never organized another "Trolls' Nights Out" after that, and shut down the original "Trollheim Central", waiting a year before creating a new one. Rest assured, "Reality Check" will NOT be advertising the times and places of its events where the general pagan public can see them. We don't want to see history repeat itself. Let's return to the previous discussion ("Prima Nocturne Tries Again").