I'm a liberal and I drink

I went to my first Drinking Liberally event last night. I went by accident, if you wanna know the truth. I'm not much of a joiner, but I might have gone on purpose if I'd known it was more or less in the neighborhood.

Stella and I stopped, as we usually do, at our neighborhood pub for a beer and maybe some peanuts while we were on our walk last night, and there were a few familiar faces on the deck, and quite a few people I didn't know. It felt almost like they were expecting me, even the ones I didn't know, but I couldn't quite say why. It took a while for me to notice that it was an official Drinking Liberally event, but I caught on after a while. Nobody asked me for the password or a secret handshake or anything. Maybe I'll get to that part next time.

There were several groups of people there to drink liberally, it turned out, and Stella liked them all, especially the ones who were eating peanuts. There were multiple conversations to choose from, with topics ranging from local politics to obscure rock bands to Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.

I will note that there was, as far as I could tell, only one other chick there. There might have been one other in that group inside the bar. What's up with that? And what could it possibly mean that we both studied Linguistics, back in the day?