Twenty years ago, Kate and I attended an opening-night screening of a movie called Serenity, based on a short-lived show nobody saw. Imagine our surprise when we saw the line.

People were in costume, and there were a lot of hideous orange pom-pom hats out there. One fan created her own steampunk look, not based on a specific character. She stood on her seat (which had probably lived through a lot at this point) and led a sing-along to the show’s theme song.

I’ve been to a lot of conventions since then, and I haven’t seen the kind of energy from that movie theater. Cut to years later.

Welcome to Night Vale was a huge hit while I was in Doha. I discovered it through some fan-art on Tumblr at the same time everybody else did. It made lists of cool and underappreciated entertainments in a lot of news sources.

It was enough to make me check it out. Starting from the beginning, the first thing you hear is a long announcement not to go into the new dog park. You are told not to approach the dog park and to ignore any hooded figures inside.

Welcome to Night Vale is a local radio show, hosted by the honey-voiced Cecil Palmer, played by Cecil Baldwin. He says something profound and/or spooky, and then “Welcome to Night Vale!” He reads the news, the community calendar, the ads, the horoscopes, traffic, and so on. Everything he reads has a twist of the paranoid and supernatural, as well as just plain ordinary.

Helicopters circle overhead because the government is watching everything you do. The producers of the Night Vale community radio station are insectoid creatures. I lost count of how many gods they had to make sacrifices to.

It is one of the cheeriest and uplifting shows I’ve ever enjoyed, soothing with its formula. I followed religiously for years, but sometime after I moved to DC, I stopped listening. Some of it was because I didn’t have the time, but some of it was because the formula was working against it. The quality of the writing wasn’t going down, but the juxtaposition of mundane life with cosmic horror didn’t feel as fresh as it used to.

They added new characters to keep things alive, such as Tamika Flynn, who once spent an entire night in the library, being stalked by those foul, insidious librarians, and Deb, the sentient cloud. They’re great, and the actors are great. They even got nerd favorite, Wil Wheaton to voice one. Along with storylines that stretched over much of the seasons, it was getting too complicated.

I saw the ad and debated going for a while. I thought I’d give myself something to look forward to on September 11, so I bought my tickets, took the short hop to the U Street station and pulled out my phone for directions to the Lincoln Theater. My phone told me it was not going to do that. I looked up to get my bearings and beheld the Lincoln Theater, right across the street.

You can’t nail down a demographic here. You saw the goth crowd, piercings and pink/blue/green hair. There were a lot of nerdy girls, two in lab coats, wearing goggles. There were men in business casual, women in their nicer dresses. There were older people, there were younger people. There were infants, and there were grade-school kids. This is fine because, for all the horrifying deaths, Welcome to Night Vale is a surprisingly wholesome show.

One of the reasons Welcome to Night Vale has such a dedicated fan base is that it is inclusive. Cecil will always call you by your preferred name and pronouns, his courtship of scientist Carlos, who has amazing hair, was the only long story arc I was invested in. The audience had a queer vibe to it because they felt welcome here. Welcome to Night Vale isn’t a gay show, but it’s a show where it’s okay to be gay.

To my left was a family with an infant. That could bode poorly. I didn’t have to listen to the kid’s wailing because, as soon as the kid got uppity, the dad took him out of the auditorium. I feel bad he had to miss the show, but thank you, sir.

To my right were the T-shirts, shorts, and sandals type. The feminine one talked non-stop about being engaged then not engaged, then pursuing boys, then what to call themselves now that since they can’t be called a wife. Maybe “spouse”? Then they talked about their wife. Then, when the show started, they and the masculine one took hands.

I endured the musical guest. She could play the guitar well, her voice was good, but I do not like Ani DiFranco music. Every time she finished a song, I had hope we’d see the main event soon, dashed when she started again. I haven’t been this demoralized by singing since I watched Les Miserables at the Kennedy Center.

The show went on, introduced by Jeffrey Kramer, the co-creator. Cecil Baldwin took the stage, and he’s just as good looking and charming as he sounds. Tamika Flynn worked the crowd. And it was fine. It was a bit stripped down from past live shows, and it stuck the formula. It felt like a an episode of the, which I could get for free (with ads).

What did I pay fifty bucks for? To see Cecil in person, for one. But mostly for the crowd. I didn’t know anyone who listened to Welcome to Night Vale, so I felt along in my love for it. I was surrounded by people who had been swept away by the imagination and the cleverness of everything. There were people there who felt seen by the show.

In the End Times, that’s worth more than fifty bucks.