Nightlife / Stephanie Depasquale

Tilting down memory lane

By Stephanie De Pasquale | Wednesday, May 07, 2008 | () comments

My best friend and former roommate at Augustana College came back to the Quad-Cities last weekend, so we headed to Tilt, in The District of Rock Island, which has attracted a lot of Augie students since it opened in October.

The two of us graduated only a year ago, but the trip down memory lane just made me feel old.

I saw groups of girls gathered around each other according to which sorority they belong to, and one girl toasted her senior seminar nearly being over. I did the same thing last year, but now it all seems a little silly.

A lot has changed in a year

My friend commented that she could tell she had been out of the scene for a while because she didn’t know any of the songs the DJ played.

And a trip to find an ATM led us to 2nd Avenue, which was the place to go when we were seniors. But even at 12:30 a.m., the place was dead.

The normally packed dance floor had only a few people on it, and if we wanted to order a drink, we could have just walked up to the bar instead of having to squeeze through other customers and wait an eternity to be noticed by a bartender among the sea of people.

Some things never change

When I was in college and would go out with friends to The District, there inevitably would be one person, usually a man, who would show up at a bar known for catering to people in their early 20s even though they were old enough to be the parent of everyone else in the place.

Saturday night at Tilt was no different. There was a man who was easily in his early 50s, wearing bright red earplugs and swaying back and forth in the middle of the dance floor. It was hard to tell whether the swaying was an attempt at dancing, a result of too much alcohol or a combination of the two.

He was alone, security was watching his every move and the groups of sorority girls dancing together would move away whenever he swayed in their direction.

One District staple that my stomach was very happy to find still there was the Chinese food stand that parks in the middle of 2nd Avenue on busy bar nights.

I finished Saturday night off with the greasy goodness of fried rice, kabobs and crab rangoon cooked so fresh the kabob burned my tongue. Now if there were just a gyro stand, I might take trips down memory lane more often.