Ever since 'the shit went down,' I'm trying to catalog my memories of places where you could be around other people and have fun and not worry so much if someone else coughed on you.
Today, we're doing a niche dive into a certain Christian coffee house that also functioned as a music venue. The Outer Cafe was a place that was incredibly important for connecting young punks in the late 90's, and there's zero internet footprint I can find other than a nostalgic Facebook group of people trading Slick Shoes bootleg CD-R's.
I've never been a Christian, so this was a whole other scene for me. I grew up Jehovah's Witness, which is its own insane ideology, but they don't believe in Hell, which is cool. My family left the church (or, Kingdom Hall as the JW's call it) when I was pretty young. Before then, I remember sitting in the Kingdom Hall (church) and just being bored, looking at my shoes, and sniffing the fresh, crispy, ripe bibles laid dutifully on each folding chair.
When I hit high school, I finally was able to meet other people with more underground music tastes that leaned towards mine, and we'd all go out to shows on Friday or Saturday nights. One of the biggest hot spots was The Outer Cafe in Oklahoma City. It was a Christian coffee shop that was run by a church. The coffee was always free, in the era where it was always served with a flavored syrup. But better yet, the shows were cheap and plentiful.