What the hell isn’t happening this weekend? Between Doors Open YYC, Alberta Culture Days and the bloody Abundance Festival at The AREA, Calgary will surely be a buzz with business friends.

All of those events are great, but something you’re especially going to want to make room on your dance card for (quite literally) is the We Should Know Each Other (WSKEO) 100, at The King Edward School.

WSKEO organizer and founder Mark Hopkins has assured me that he has thought of everything when it comes to this event, and after our brief conversation, I think he might be right. The event takes place over the course of the weekend and includes a laundry list of participating groups, everyone from First Calgary Financial to Russian Theatre Calgary.

“WSKEO is a collision of community coming together to find exciting ways to connect,” says Mark. “It [WSKEO] will be one of the most surprising, adventurous events that I think will bring out the essence of what community in Calgary means”

Mark’s been holding WSKEO parties for about four years now and has said each event has been just as unique as the next.

“I worked in the theatre for quite a number of years, and when I moved into the literary world, I realized that for some reason they didn’t seem to intersect,” says Mark. “This was totally weird to me. I started to see more and more that the dance community didn’t connect to the fine arts community who didn’t connect to the environmental community and so on.” And thus WSKEO was born.

Mark began to bring small pockets of people looking to find opportunities to make relationships with others outside their typical group. Four years and 99 parties later, Mark has helped make beautiful connections between the many diverse community groups among us. Awwwww!

So back to this weekend. Shmoozing aside, the WSKEO 100 is filled with slow dances, Ghostbusters, opera and of course sexual health workshops in case the slow dancing gets serious. Without community celebrating parties like Mark’s, cross-pollination of groups would never happen, and then we’d be… well I don’t know, but it would be bad.

Visit the WSKEO facebook page for more details, times, address and the usual business, and don’t forget to leave room on your dance card!