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.
