Most of you were probably wondering what, exactly, was wrong with us on Saturday. I mean, great tragedy, much news, and from us, nearly zippo. My mom, who thinks opera is merely a slight exaggeration in life, of course thought we'd been turned into a particularly compact can of spam on some freeway somewhere in the area.

Far from it. In actual fact, we were being introduced to "goth" culture by our very best new friends, Batty & Skully, aka Kris & Damion. Now, for us, we felt very much like one of those British documentary film-makers (in sing-song Cambridge voice): "Notice... how... the Goth uses not only the TEXture of fabric but also the, creative. color. schemes. Only in this parTICular culture, will you find, so many shades of black..." sort of thing.

Since this was an event planned by guys (myself and Damion), Ellen received exactly, oh, four hours of notice (she says... I think it was more like 12. Is it my fault she says "sleeping doesn't count!") that we were going "out". "WHAT?!?" was the reaction I was confronted with, "I have nothing to wear!!! I am pregnant and Nothing. F*cking. Fits."

"But I think you're sexy just the way you are." (see! see! I'm well trained! TOLDJA!) "Besides, Damion says Kris will come and help you pick stuff out!" (see! see! Damion is well trained too!)

"Do I look Kris-shaped to you?!?"

An aside: Kris and Ellen are normally quite similar in build, the primary difference being that Kris is 4 inches taller. Damion and I, being the Neanderthal descendants that we are, simply assumed, clothes-wise, one needed only especially tall platforms ("Yeah," Ellen says, "like, off-shore drilling platforms.") to be able to wear the clothes of the other. Normally. Unfortunately, as you all should know by now, Ellen has an... addition... that makes this equation not work out so well. At this point Ellen looks like she swallowed a 2-for-1-get-them-before-they-explode cantaloupe.

"But you'll get to go... SHOPPING" (both said in unison, Damion and Scott, separated by many miles geographical distance, only a few microseconds in the Land of the Domesticated Man).

What we were really doing was the well-worn guy technique known as "buying time". What we were actually wanting to do was tinker with my car and talk hot-rodding for several hours. Normally this is greeted with much eye-rolling and loaded-gun sighing by the ladies in our life, but by providing a convenient "out", we were able to distract ninja-like our lovelies while we got down to the real purpose of the visit... that being Banging on Cars.

Unfortunately Banging on Cars didn't go very well... this particular car needing an extra special tool that, in spite of valiant efforts on Damion's behalf, simply couldn't be created. Instead of triumphantly healing my wounded steed, we instead spent the next three hours learning new ways to express the phrase, "mother f*cking nut won't f*cking come loose". Fortunately, Kris and Ellen had a far more interesting encounter:

We were on a quest for Goth clothes, something that would fit a pregnant chick and look good and not scream "look at me, I'm a mundane trying to fit in!" The problem was, the nearest "real" Goth store was two hours away in Richmond. The best we could do was a tiny wannabe store in a very large rich-yuppie mall. We didn't find stank. I even ended up dragging poor Kris into a maternity store so I could find stockings.

However, on the way out we did watch a girl collapse at a boutique store, dragging down a whole display of purses like a tiny not-quite-leather avalanche. 'Oh look, she's having a seizure' walk, walk, walk.

Kris later related that she was glad other folks immediately rushed to this girl's aide, because it was all she could do to keep up with Ellen.

After the girls returned from the shopping excursion, Kris and Ellen went upstairs to try on the various outfits that Kris had raided from her closet(s). As per usual, none of it fit, but there was an entire apartment full of clothing to choose from at their place.

Of course, that left me. While waiting for Kris and Ellen to decide that nothing fit (why does this always seem to take two hours?!?), Damion and I were sitting on the couch doing what guys always do when they are waiting on women... watching TV.

"Scotttt..." came the all-too-familiar voice from upstairs, "we need to go to the mall to get your costume."

"Costume?!?" Kris and Damion were quite bemused. "Oh, no problems," Damion said to me as we searched for a car race, "you can just get your black pants and we'll find some shirt at my place."

"Umm... do they have to be black?"

"Well, yeah, and black shoes too."

"Umm... does really dark blue count?"

"Hang on a minute," he said, growing horror in his eyes, "you mean to tell me you don't own any black pants?!?"

Apparently this is a major faux pas in the Goth world. It felt sort of like someone noticing I had crashed a wedding reception for the free booze.

"Ummm... no?"

"At least you have black shoes, right?"

"Well, I have a pair of really dark brown ones for my suite... does that count?"

I could tell by the look in everyone's eyes (of course Ellen and Kris had come downstairs by this time) that no, that doesn't count, not at all. This was when I was confronted with... the horror.

I, Scott, who thinks a ratty t-shirt and sweat pants are, if not the height of fashion, certainly a plateau on the way, was going to Have to Buy an Outfit.

At this point memory fast-forwards a bit, sort of like one of those montages from a bad Monkies episode, where everyone and everything is moving at double-speed. Only instead of "I'm a Believer" playing in the background I had "Black #1" by Type O Negative. Shirts were tried on, pants, even shoes, until finally we had everything assembled to make sure Scott didn't embarrass everyone with white shoes and brown socks. I felt more than a little like Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman stuffing all my new bags and boxes into the back of the Cruiser as we traveled to Kris and Damion's house to finish the outfitting.

Again, Ellen:

Ultimately, after we arrived at Kris & Damion's place, I found an outfit in Kris's closet that did the trick. A form-fitting red velour dress (which showed off the cantaloupe quite nicely) that Kris accented with a black jacket with fake fur trim. Unlike my knuckle-dragging husband, I already owned a proper pair of boots to set the ensemble off.

This was where we were confronted, once again, with a difference in culture.

Ellen and I only look like a young couple on the outside. In reality, we merely need bad plaid pants and an especially tall Cadillac (allowing Ellen to peer through the steering wheel) to do a convincing imitation of snowbirds in Florida. We tend to end our day at 10 pm, and that only when we're feeling especially energetic. I'd read about people "going out at 9 pm to get an early start" like other folks read about Maori starting into the surf at 4 am to go fishing. By the time we set out we were worried everything would be closed.

We arrived at a club named, appropriately enough, "Midnight", for an "evening of the 80s". Set in one of the more pedestrian downtown office areas of the District, as with most small clubs you had to know what you were looking for or you missed it. Now, I'd been to clubs before, so I was prepared for the guy at the front taking your money and joking about things you could barely hear over the music. Unfortunately for me, as I was to encounter many times during the night, Goth folks are a lot brighter than your average club-goers. The bouncer was completely clued-in to the fact I had no idea what he was talking about, and so kept chattering at me so I'd feel even sillier.

The club itself was down two flights of stairs, a small affair consisting of two rooms: a dance floor and a "bar" area, each a square not much more than 20 feet to a side, connected at the corners. Dark (of course) with bone-thumping music crashing through the sound system, but only temporary "midnight" decorations (i.e. black cloth) covering the standard screwed-on monochrome photos of anonymous 1930s scenes from... oh hell I don't know, where do they get these pictures from anyway... Pacoima? At first there weren't really that many people, but that would change. Oh my, would that change.

I'd been to clubs before, back in college. Sterile, intimidating places where I knew going in I had only slightly less in common with the "regulars" than I would with someone from, say, Alpha Centauri. In these earlier clubs I was struck with how much the people had in common with the devout church-goers of my small town... unbelievably self-conscious, rigidly conformal, whose sole reason for attending was to see and be seen, completely ignoring the real purpose of the place. Looking into their eyes, in the middle of the apse or the center of the dance floor, your gaze echoed inside the cats-eye hollow windows of their pretty metal souls.

This place couldn't have been more different. In outward appearance, Goth culture is about nothing if it is not about ambiguity. We saw guys with more, and better, makeup than a fashion model, girls with short hair and piercings enough to make any airport security guard weep, and literally everything in between.

Yet on the inside these people couldn't have been more sincere, less self-conscious, and just plain happy to find themselves among other people who valued the differences. Folks think the heart of America lies at the 50-yard line of a football stadium, the middle of a church social, the Ferris wheel of a state fair. They're all wrong. You haven't seen diversity until you've watched a six-and-a-half foot tall woman with a buzz cut, spiked collar, and wings tattooed on her back chatting amicably with a bald man in a black leather kilt. They'd all be flabbergasted to hear me say it, but as far as I'm concerned America's center was in the middle of Midnight's dance floor.

If you learn anything about me, about this site, about what either of us value, it's intelligence. Neither of us care what you look like, who you were born to, who you happen to love, as long as you can stand up for what you believe in without using your fists, accept that you have been outmaneuvered through words alone, and agree to disagree and mean it without a rise in blood pressure. Every single one of these people, every single one of these people, was like that. In spite of, or perhaps because of, what they looked like.

Oh, it wasn't all serious, not even by a quarter. We got to meet up with our other new best friends, Josh and Carrie. Josh is like a wookie without the hair. Really large, really smart, really nice, but, like, really large. Carrie is Betty Paige in black fabric, the chronicler of the bunch and our guide to exactly what the hell was going on. Without Carrie, I probably would've been beaten to a pulp by a large, heavily tattooed Asian lady whom I inadvertently whacked across the back of the head.

Things we learned while people watching at a Goth club:

• When a Goth asks you to dance, that means they're inviting you to the floor. Don't take it personally if they do their own thing. That's the point.
• If you're a girl, it's considered completely normal to ask makeup tips from the guy in the mesh top, pleather pants, and purple lipstick.
• It really is possible to dance gracefully in seven inch platform shoes.
• Black matches.
• Lace doesn't... it must be "of the same pattern" (don't ask me, Ellen made me type that). This was apparently Deep Magic for which we had not learned the Gothic Secret Handshake and Double-Wink to earn instruction.
• There's no such thing as a corset laced too tight.

Toward the end, no matter how hard our four friends tried, we still felt like we had "kiss me, I'm the mundane" signs around our necks. It wasn't a bad feeling, we really were having a blast, but eventually it all caught up with us and the music started to feel a lot like someone ramming aluminum foil into your ears. It took a few tries, but Damion finally managed to corral an alarmingly wobbly Kris off the dance floor.

"Just one more song guys... just one more song!"

We couldn't have said it better ourselves.