The Personality Cafe, part of the recent Dublin Fringe Festival, merited only a few sentences in this newspaper last month. The cafe, which was open nightly during the festival at the scrumdiddlyumptious Cake Cafe, off Camden Street, was dismissed as a well-meaning but artistically dubious project.
This dismissal stung. For me, the Personality Cafe was one of the most worthwhile elements of the fringe. The people behind it deserve more kudos. They deserve a medal.
The people behind the cafe are an assorted bunch: artists and IT folk, who play volleyball together in Herbert Park. The team put in a proposal to the fringe organisers, saying they would produce a cafe that every night would be managed by a different member of the group. Their concept was that each night punters would arrive not knowing what kind of cafe they were going into. It was the thing that jumped out at me - as a lover of surprises - as I flicked through the fringe programme.
I brought my mother, brother and boyfriend along on the first night. At the door we were told that tonight we were to treat the cafe as if it were our home. We exchanged our shoes for fluffy slippers, sat down at a table and set about making ourselves tea and toast. Well, what I mean is that the boyfriend made the toast and generally tidied up. Home sweet home.
That night, playing cards and other games involving flinging teaspoons around the place, we laughed until we were hoarse. My mother, not normally the most tactile of people, gave Nina, one of the volleyball team, a massive hug on the way out. "It's weird, but I feel like I've known her all my life," she said.
The next night my boyfriend and I went back. The cafe was, as promised, a different place. A philosophical waiter told us we could order from the menu after we had each given him a piece of wisdom. I gave him a synopsis of The Four Agreements, the wisest book on my shelves, and my boyfriend shared something he'd recently learned from personal experience about coping with fear.
All around us people were swapping wisdom while the waiter patiently debated with them the veracity of their ideas. We got chatting to a young girl from Glasgow at the next table. An actress, Kirstin had just finished a run of her play and had come to the Personality Cafe alone. She told us about the Glasgow subway system, which runs in a circle, and how she once travelled the circle, getting off at every stop on the line to have a conversation with a stranger on the platform. At one of the stops she met an older man with whom she had so much in common she felt he was an older version of herself. The wisdom she offered to her waiter was that we should keep our eyes open for younger or older versions of ourselves. "They are everywhere," she trilled in a gorgeous Scottish lilt that a man at another table said he'd like to bottle.
We got on so well with Kirstin that before we knew it we'd given her a lift to her digs, down in Docklands, took her for dinner, danced the night away in the Spiegeltent and brought her home, where she stayed, sipping vodka, until the early hours. We went through our India photo album, and Kirstin taught us a song about a "small rain that soaks you right through". We will visit her in Scotland. Our new best friend.
The last time we went to the Personality Cafe it was a twilight picnic. Paper cups and plates, home-made goodies, cucumber sandwiches and little tealights on the grass. A waitress came around with tiny weeds for us to plant in our table. There was elderflower juice with jugs of good cheer on the side.
Maybe the critic was right. Maybe it had nothing to do with art. Or maybe it had everything to do with it. The art of conversation. The art of playing. The art of sharing. The art of service. The art of imagination. The art of connecting. The art of simplicity. The Personality Cafe offered a safe, alcohol-free space where people of all ages could gather to be surprised, to interact and to turn strangers into friends.
Writing recently about a survey that suggested 93 per cent of people would be "too shy" to approach people they didn't know at a party, I got to thinking about the value of creating spaces like this. In an increasingly isolated world, there's a lot to be said for a place you can go after work for a couple of hours, where the staff and customers want to talk to you, surprise you or, sometimes, challenge you. Where people are interested in what you have to offer and in what you have to say.
If mingling becomes a dying art, and face-to-face communication is usurped by MySpace and Bebo, we'll need more places like the Personality Cafe.