During a rap concert at the Ottobar, Karima Gibson met a nice, exceptionally tall guy. "He was flirting with me. I was flirting with him," says Gibson, a teacher at the Stadium School.
Of course, things got complicated, because this is Smalltimore, a storied community of coincidences and interconnections where friends may have more in common than they first realize.
Later, as Gibson listened to a girlfriend describe the "really nice guy" she had met at Rams Head Live, a familiar, exceptionally tall portrait emerged. "Oh, my god, wait a minute, what's his name?" Gibson demanded. And so they discovered, "We were dating the same guy."
"We just laughed at it," the 35-year-old Hamilton resident says. "'Since you met him first, he's all yours,'" she told her girlfriend. "Neither of us ended up with him."
Whether mundane or memorable, piquant or pathetic, stories abound of the city's tangled web of social connections and, with each retelling, knit its residents more tightly together -- and reinforce the perils of gossiping in the grocery aisle.
The apartment unknowingly occupied several years apart by two friends, hearing your own "surprise" baby saga recounted as an urban legend, being paired twice with the same person through different dating services: Baltimoreans delight in such connect-the-dot stories -- the zanier the better -- and use them to justify their city's cherished nickname.
"By focusing on our quirkiness and the whole idea of Smalltimore, we create this identity of ourselves that is homey, that is appealing, warm and accessible," says Kevin Griffin Moreno, a Mount Washington resident with a blog called Mobtown Blues. "I think that we collectively do a better job of putting that out there than other cities of comparable size."
Taking civic pride in the belief that Baltimore is blessed with a particularly potent brand of kismet is one thing. The facts are another.
"These small-world connections, which, when they happen seem so marvelous and so out of the blue, are really very common," says Ed Scheinerman, professor of applied mathematics and statistics in the Whiting School of Engineering at the Johns Hopkins University.
"You probably know about 1,000 people and they probably know about 1,000 people. That would add up to 1 million people if there was no overlap. So, two steps out from your social circle is a huge circle," making frequent connections inevitable, says Scheinerman, a social network theorist.
Baltimore's population plunge from nearly 1 million in 1950 to about 641,000 in 2006 may have something to do with the Small- timore notion that friends and former lovers are just a few handshakes away.
At the same time, Baltimoreans' immobility could contribute to the Smalltimore phenomenon. That nearly three-quarters of Baltimore City residents were born in Maryland, according to census data, also suggests that Baltimoreans are an inert lot, says Mark Goldstein, an economist with the Maryland Department of Planning.
"What fascinates me about Baltimore are the concentric circles of friends and acquaintances," says Karen Stokes, a Baltimore resident for 17 years, in an e-mail.
"I have many of those circles (like all of us have) -- you know, the people you know from the swim club, from your kids' pre-school, and then elementary, middle, and finally high school," says Stokes, executive director of the Greater Homewood Community Association. "Then there are the sport teams your kids have played on, the church you go to, and in many ways less important -- the work you do."
At a recent Lauraville fete, Stokes says, "I ran into lots of people from those various circles, and not realizing until I saw those circles connecting at the party that all of these people also somehow knew each other." That's mostly a good thing for Stokes, an inveterate civic networker. But, beware, she says, "There is no anonymity in Baltimore, and hardly any anonymity of your own activity either."
The 'Donna's twitch'
Small-town discretion is advised. "We have the 'Donna's twitch,'" says Moreno, 35, who works for a local nonprofit. "When you have lunch or dinner at Donna's and you're sitting with a colleague or a friend and start getting maybe a little critical of [another] colleague, then all of a sudden you catch yourself and do this little spastic sort of movement to try to take in the entire room and make sure the person you're talking about is not there."
Another measure of Smalltimore is whether a personal anecdote has ever been relayed to you by a stranger. Baltimore photographer Chris Hartlove remembers expressing admiration for the gravel-voiced troubadour Tom Waits to a new acquaintance at a party. "This person said, 'I read this great story in Style magazine about a guy who asked a woman to marry him because she knew the lyrics to Tom Waits' songs.'"
That guy was Hartlove, who married Abby Lattes, although not only for her perfect recall.
You will be seen
Other Smalltimore vignettes smack more of claustrophobia than romance. "If you ever dated anybody in Baltimore and decide to go anywhere, Hampden or Fells Point, the odds were very high you would either run into them or the former significant other of the person you are now dating or the former significant other's current significant other, and tension would ensue," says the now-married Moreno.
In the mid-1970s, Vanessa White had a "really, really, really good friend who was going with this really, really, really nice girl. We thought she was wonderful," says White, owner of Vanessa's Vintage Treasures in South Baltimore.
One evening, White's friend and his buddies ventured to The Block. In one show bar, "There's this beautiful girl sitting in the [revolving] champagne glass," White says, replaying that fateful night. "When it turns around, it's his girlfriend. He had no idea. She had one leg kicked up in the air, one shoe on and one shoe off."
White's friend never returned to The Block, or to his girlfriend.
As well as people, property has a way of reappearing in the lives of longtime Baltimoreans and linking them to one another. As a young child, Gabriel Kroiz lived in the Marlborough Apartments in Bolton Hill, where his father was the building manager. As a newly minted architect, Kroiz found himself working on a renovation of the Marlborough. Years later, his wife, Mina Cheon, was part of a team that created a virtual tour of the Cone sisters' apartments in the Marlborough for the Baltimore Museum of Art. "Every road somehow crosses the Marlborough," Kroiz says.
Smalltimore isn't confined to city limits. Once, on a New York City street, Charles Village resident Lisa Simeone had no sooner invoked John Waters' name than she nearly collided with the filmmaker. It was "totally cosmic," the host of NPR's World of Opera says.
Smalltimore, as well, is as much about the past as it is the present. As they conducted oral histories with previous residents of the once-thriving community along Pennsylvania Avenue, Willie and Zelma Ragsdale struck Smalltimore gold. Again and again, interview subjects told the couple: "'If you wanted to meet anybody, you just came to Mosher and Pennsylvania Avenue. At that corner, that person will walk by it some time, because if you had to go to the bank or the drugstore or the market, you went by that corner."
As Baltimore's population stabilizes after years of loss, Smalltimore stories may become less common. And yet, says James Evans, CEO of illume communications, "Smalltimore" retains all the punch of a hip brand.
As he confirmed in a very Smalltimore way, the term brings added value to Charm City life. Evans was dining with friends and a newcomer to his Tuscany-Canterbury apartment building. Naturally, dinner party chatter turned to Smalltimore.
As his friends traded tales, Evans mentioned that he had reserved the Web domain for Smalltimore.
"You're the guy!" the newcomer exclaimed, a bit irately.
It happened that a friend of hers had tried to buy the domain name from Evans, but e-mail negotiations had faltered. "We howled about that," Evans says.
Soon, Evans says he hopes to have his Smalltimore Web site up and running so that anyone may post accounts of local ties that bind. Advertising may follow.
And then, perhaps Evans can expand the Smalltimore brand to another city with small-town pretensions. But up there, they call it Smallbany.
stephanie.shapiro@baltsun.com