View the album (Photos by Jay Paul)
Something special happened in RVA last Saturday.
The worldwide phenomena, Diner en Blanc, landed in Richmond for the first time. A thousand white-clad revelers, mainly from Richmond but some from Washington, D.C., New York City, and even Atlanta, boarded buses around the city to be ferried to a secret destination — the Science Museum of Virginia.
The bus drivers, though, didn’t drop their passengers at the museum. Instead they released their riders a short distance away, allowing them to descend upon the museum in an orderly parade, in a sort of monochromatic flash mob. At the museum, they set up their tables and chairs — also all white. Some were simple setups, card tables and folding chairs, carried with them on the bus. Others were elaborate, china place settings and floral displays prepared in advance for the party.
At the museum, while the thousand drank and noshed as the sun set, the mistress of ceremonies, Kelli Lemon, led an evening of live music and DJ spinning. Unlike the clothing, the crowd was diverse. “The diversity of [attendees] shows Richmond is changing in a lot of great ways,” Lemon says. One of the event’s organizers, Enjoli Moon, echoed Lemon’s sentiment: “Folks came to party from different parts of the city, a nice energy inspired by all this diversity coming together.”
Moon, along with Ayana Obika and Christine Wansleben, worked for more than a year to bring DEB to Richmond. “For the first time out of the gate, it was fairly smooth,” Moon says. Plans are already in the making for next year’s dinner. A little fine-tuning will happen, to be sure, but Moon and the other organizers want to maintain the same spirit of friends and strangers coming together to share a special evening.