New in Town: The First Time I’ve Ever Wanted Longer Skirts

I have a question for long-time Stamfordians.

My wife and I are not exactly night owls. There are some nights during the summer when I barely manage to stay awake until it gets dark. In fact, when our daughter was much younger, teens used to love babysitting for us, because we’d get home in plenty of time for them to go out.

This is all to say that it’s a rare occasion on which we find ourselves out after 10pm. But that was the case this past Saturday night when we were in downtown Stamford around 11.

Were you aware of what goes on down there on a Saturday night?

We arrived at Barcelona, an excellent Spanish restaurant on Summer Street, at 7:30 for dinner with one couple who had also recently moved to Stamford from Westchester and another who were mildly considering such a move if they could only get over the impression that we lived in the middle of nowhere.

When we entered the restaurant, the area looked like it normally looks: casually-dressed, normal-looking people going to the movie theater or other restaurants. But when we emerged at 11pm it was if the cast and crew of The Jersey Shore had invaded the neighborhood while we were eating. Suddenly there were muscle-bound bouncers in front of every other doorway, and the streets were filled with Snooki clones wearing short skirts that should not legally be available in their sizes and scary-looking young men who were frightening not because they posed the potential of bodily harm but because they appeared to be several steps behind on the evolution chart.

So here’s my question: where do these people come from? I haven’t noticed them around town in daylight. Do they have alter-egos? Do they spend their days as traders for UBS or something and then transform into club-hopping denizens of the night? Are they True Blood and Twilight enthusiasts who rise from their crypts when the sun goes down to don inappropriate attire and prowl the streets? Or are they all creatures from...(dramatic music)...Norwalk? Or even worse, Pound Ridge?

And, more important, will they make our friends who still live in Westchester more or less likely to move to Stamford?

For more on our adventures as first-time homeowners at age 57, and moving to Stamford, visit http://theupsizers.wordpress.com/