After Three Years, The Guys @ DCGreeks.com ask, Is this

The End of DCGreeks.com?

July 27, 2004

After three years of DCGreeks.com under our belts, we ask ourselves how much longer we’re planning to continue this experiment in bringing together Greek-Americans from the D.C. area and beyond to a website that on a good day we simply started as a hobby, and on a bad day, we simply started as a joke. We’ve always had our 20 to 25 year exit strategy in mind, where hopefully one day our sons and daughters team up to take over as The Guys @ DCGreeks.com. It would even be cooler if it we just had girls – they’d still be The Guys @ DCGreeks.com regardless, because much like the Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride, it’s the name “The Guys @ DCGreeks.com” that will make people stop and pose for pictures. But if we don’t want to be pushing 55 and still trolling Greek Nights after years of pushing strollers, carting the kids to Greek School, and coaching each and every one of them until they’ve all graduated from GOYA basketball, we’ve got to think of a plan, and quick.

We mused upon the “Coy and Vance” strategy, but only for a minute. If you remember watching The Dukes of Hazzard, you may recall that they replaced Bo and Luke with Coy and Vance, another blonde and brunette duo, slapped a blue and yellow shirt on each them, put them in the General Lee and hoped that no one would notice. I guess we could do that, find a couple of harmless enough guys, shave their heads, and give them a camera to go around Greek Nights and make DCGreeks.com continue in all perpetuity, until the fans of the site got surly, and then we’d have to come back to assume our roles. Unfortunately we have problems with “phoning it in” just among ourselves, especially me and writing these articles, that we couldn’t possibly trust someone else to replace us.

We’ve thought about taking a break for a while and putting the site on autopilot -- recycle, some articles, heck, even recycle some pictures. Our critics accuse us of taking pictures of the same five people (four girls, one guy) anyway, and say that it’s the same people who show up to Greek events. I bet you that during the summer we could probably get away with that. It’s not like at some of these events you’d even notice. Let’s face it, you know each of you out there has like maybe one or two Greek Night outfits that you wear during the summer, and that they look rather similar to each other, so if we were to go to the first Greek Night of the summer, take some pictures, and then repost them for the next two Greek Nights, I guarantee you no one would notice. Who would be able to confirm that the girl in picture 2 or the guy in picture 3 wasn’t at the last Greek Night?  We have to applaud the organizers of Third Thursday for taking a break for the summer after almost three straight years of monthly gatherings. Attendance had been waning all throughout the spring and people were complaining that Third Thursdays weren’t what they used to be. We haven’t had a Third Thursday since May and admittedly, we’re missing it. (Third Thursday Organizers: For a group of organizers whose claim to fame is no organization and no structure, y’all are geniuses, making all of us not take Third Thursday for granted anymore. Now if you could bring please bring back to Virginia every now and again, that would be great. Four words for you: “Clarendon Ballroom, Rooftop, September.”)

Some of you are probably asking, “But don’t you guys like being The Guys @ DCGreeks.com? You’ve meet a lot of people, everyone knows you and knows about your site…” To this we jokingly reply, “With great power comes great responsibility.” We started this site as a public service, a way to help people find out what’s going on in the area, to help other Greek-Americans get to know each other, and to have a place to go to stay connected to the Community when they’re too busy with work, and their non-Greek lives to be going to church or to Greek Night every weekend. Our role was always meant to be behind the scenes, supporting those people on the front lines, the YAL Presidents for Life, the hardest working men in show business that are the DJs in this town, and the little old ladies who are hoping that some young woman will one day know how to make a decent kataifi so they finally retire from festival work. (You know this is the reason that some of our churches have cut back the number of festivals or have pushed them back later into the fall. When 80% of your workforce is retired and spending July and August in Greece, you can’t expect to pull a festival out of a hat on the weekend after Labor Day.) For those of you out there who still think that we’re the organizers of Third Thursday or YAL D.C. Weekend or put on Greek Nights, thank you, we’re flattered, but the real thanks should go to the real organizers of these events. Having put on one major event two and a half years ago, and in running this site, we can empathize with these organizers that it’s hard to take on that responsibility and just be a normal person in the crowd. You can’t just take off the mask and not be the YAL President, the DJ, or even one of The Guys @ DCGreeks.com, and go to a Greek event for the sake of being at a Greek event. The reason that we have very little turnover in this town in YAL Presidents is that honestly, no one wants the job, because you can’t enjoy yourself at a festival, a dance, or at anything else where your organization is ultimately responsible for its success. There are times when one or both of us haven’t wanted to go to an event, but one of us has almost always shown up, just to take pictures, so people don’t complain to us on Monday that there weren’t any pictures on the site.

(And by the way, for those of you who think that having the DCGreeks.com camera is a great way to meet girls – try stopping and having a conversation with someone when you know in the back of your mind that it’s 1:30, and you’ve only taken three pictures and Greek Night ends in an hour. The no-win situation continues when you get the girls out there who check out the site on Monday and say to themselves, “Camera Guy must only be interested in the kinds of girls that dance on tables and pose for pictures.” Even if that’s only one of fifty pictures that Camera Guy took that night, it’s enough to make him into some Greek paparazzi scumbag that nice girls won’t talk too. And speaking as Article Guy, if you haven’t figured it out after three years, my article on Why We Love Greek Girls, was a complete parody, and we’re really not that dumb, naïve or stupid about Greek girls. We are all these things, yes, but not as evidenced in that article. Three years later, we only stand behind the caption to the picture in the lower left hand corner of the article, and the second sentence of the last paragraph. Give me until after Olympics, a bottle of ouzo, and an oversized two ounce Greek shot glass, not the piddely one-and-a-half-ouncers that the rest of the world is using, and I promise you, I’ll write you a brilliant commentary entitled, “Why We Don’t Know Skata About Greek Girls,” or I might just phone it in, who knows. If you have an issue with it, we can talk about it in person on the rooftop of the Clarendon Ballroom on the Third Thursday in September as Camera Guy takes your picture.)

So will DCGreeks.com continue into a fourth season? Yeah it will. We’ve appreciated all the emails we’ve received over the years, even the mean ones, telling us about our site, what y’all like, and what we could be doing better. If we haven’t had a chance to respond to it, please understand that we’ve been busy with our day jobs, but that your thoughts were definitely appreciated. In the fall we’ll try to bring back The Kafeneio to return an outlet of expression back to our viewers, and hope that we can keep the outbursts to a PG-13 level. We don’t know what August will bring as one of us heads to the Olympics and the other one stays here for what will probably be a rather quiet month. Maybe DCGreeks.com should take a vacation as well.

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