Saturday, June 9 was quite possibly one of the most fun nights I’ve ever experienced in Indianapolis. Why, you might ask? Because it was YLD's Summer Kick-Off event at Rock Lobster in Broad Ripple! The night was an absolute blast and one of YLD’s most successful events to date. I’ve got the inside scoop on the night’s happenings.  

I arrived about 45 minutes earlier to set up, and met with Matt Jones, the General Manager at Rock Lobster, who had assisted us in coordinating all the details. We couldn’t have asked for a better person to work with—Matt was friendly, professional and extremely helpful. Once we got all of the logistics figured out with the private room YLD had reserved for the event, Matt asked if I wanted him to change the music for us. I was busy distributing flyers around the room for our June 11 social action event and wasn’t really listening to him when he told me that he had set it to a playlist with slower, more classical songs. Without paying any attention to the actual music, I told him we would be fine, thanked him and continued about my business of setting out flyers. Suddenly, the Tarzan theme song started blasting through the speakers, and Kirk, the bartender, and I immediately agreed that we needed to fetch Matt A.S.A.P. to fix the situation. No way was the Tarzan theme song going to make its way into our YLD Summer Kick-Off. (I apologize to any Tarzan fans reading this.) Matt thankfully changed the music to a Top 40 playlist, and we were all set!

A little after 9:00 p.m., the first few people strolled into the room. This was my first event as the YLD intern (it was my first YLD event period!), and my goal that night was to meet and have a conversation with every single person who came. More and more people trickled in as time passed and the room was slowly filling up, but so far, I hadn’t had any trouble in attaining my goal. Feeling pretty satisfied that this would be a piece of cake, I continued introducing myself to people, giving everyone my usual “Hi, I’m Katherine the YLD intern. I’m filling in for Inna this summer” spiel.  

Around 10:15 p.m., as I was having a conversation with someone about Russian nursery rhymes, I turned around to find that the entire room was completely PACKED! Everywhere I looked, people were laughing, talking, smiling, taking pictures … basically, I was surrounded by over 70 other people having a great time! The turnout was truly amazing, thanks to all the outreach efforts by the YLD board members! I spent the next hour and a half running around, trying to get to know as many people as possible (after finishing the conversation about Russian nursery rhymes, of course). Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get to everybody, and to those people I didn’t get to speak to, I really hope to meet you at the next event!  

All in all, the event was a great success. I truly enjoyed meeting each and every person who I talked to, and was blown away by how nice, friendly and welcoming everyone was to a YLD newcomer such as myself. A big thank you to Inna Kolesnikova Shmukler (YLD Director), Matt Tobe and Jose Suriel (YLD Co-Chairs) and Marina Grabovsky and Elizabeth Wertz (Social Co-Chairs) for all of the work they put into making this event as successful as it was!

P.S. The second I stepped out of Rock Lobster, I realized that my voice was almost completely gone. I guess talking to that many people in a short span of time does that to you! It took a few days for me to lose my man voice and finally start sounding like a normal person again, but it was totally worth it!