These days, it’s hard to know what’s cool. The word “cool” is decidedly uncool. Fall weather is literally cool. But what about the Renaissance Festival? FotoFocus? Ira Glass?
Instead of burdening ourselves with deciding what to do this fall (most of the CityBeat staff drinks at home in a blanket until March), we looked to the epitome of cool — the 1980s, obv — for guidance. John Hughes’ Breakfast Club Brat Pack had it all: a brain, a jock, an artist, a princess and a bad boy. And since we can’t ask fictional characters what motivates them to put pants on to leave the house once it drops below 60 degrees, we found our own Cincinnati Brat Pack.
Through a series of in-depth, investigative questions (aka emails), we asked our jock, Enquirer Reds beat reporter C. Trent Rosecrans; our artist, arts educator Pam Kravetz; our brain, Mercantile Library Marketing Manager Chris Messick; our princess, founder of the Young Philanthropist Society of Cincinnati Tracey Lynn Conrad; and our bad boy, OATW founder Floyd Johnson, what they were looking forward to this fall, from annual and one-off events to fall nightlife and cocktails.
Turns out, Cincinnati is full of cool stuff to do this fall. And whether or not you personally identify as a bad boy, a brain or a princess, it doesn’t matter. Like the Breakfast Club discovered, no one is simply defined as one or the other — there’s a little bit of brain, jock, princess, artist and bad boy in all of us.
(And if you don’t feel like revisiting Mr. Vernon and the Shermer High School library, you can always skip straight to the calender of events here.)
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2014.