“This party is gonna be crazy” said my 23-year old friend Sarah. “I’ll be like, the oldest person there. It’s gonna be all hipster kids, you know?”

Two things: One, I’m 30. So technically, *I* would be the oldest person there. Two, “there” was a party she found on Facebook. A tepee party, to be exact, where guests were invited to “GET FINGERED IN A TEPEE!!!” She’d seen the invite over the weekend, and on Thursday, late, we decided we would go. Not to get fingered, mind you, but maybe to watch other people get fingered. In tepees.

I took my time deciding what to wear. I’m deathly scared of hipsters, not being one myself, and so in the end I settled on ironic pigtails to set me apart from the crowd. Drinking whiskey and ginger with Sarah at her friend Ryan’s house, we discussed plans for the night, eventually deciding we’d take the bus to Fenway and walk from there. I left my North Face at the apartment (not very hip), and we set out into the cold. As we began the long trek from Kenmore to the club, my mind started to put some things together. Fenway, Boylston street, and a club called Machine….

Then it hit me.

We weren’t en route to a hipster party. We were en route to Boston’s premiere S&M gay bar. I’d worked right above it for a year back in ’06, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t realized earlier. By this time, though, we were more than halfway there. There was no turning back.

Machine was a basement cacophony. Beats, rhythm and lights, people in all manner of undress. Having paid five dollars to get in, we made it our business to sit in the teepees – more to hide from the clientele than to get fingered – but sadly, our revels did not last long. We were in and out inside of an hour. No pun intended. My tits froze on the walk back to Allston.

So free advice: whether en route to a hipster party or a gay bar, if it’s December, you should probably wear your coat.