âNobodyâs exclusive,â he said âThatâs what dating is.â  Mr. Wayne, who described his work as âgraffiti realism,â was at Mortimerâs, a wood-paneled bar on Lyndale Avenue in the swath of Minneapolis known as Uptown. It was a rainy night in mid-September, and the specter of winter, which some residents joke lasts 90 percent of the year, was already looming over the throng.  Itâs surely no accident that in âLetâs Go Crazy,â the Minneapolis native Prince describes the afterworld as a place where âyou can always see the sun, day or night.â Some eight miles downtown are connected by skyways to shield pedestrians from snow, hail and cold, turning the area into a kind of human ant farm. For residents of Uptown, which lacks skyways, going out can be a pastime for the very hearty â or the very motivated.  âYou want to fall in love in winter,â said Hayley Lindma, a 23-year-old artist who was with three friends at Mortâs, as everyone calls it, surrounded by dartboards, Big Buck Hunter games and a jukebox. When itâs cold, she said, âYou want to stay home and cuddle and watch movies and eat food and be with your pets.â  âSummerâs for flings,â said Ms. Lindma, who was wearing her shock of platinum hair piled atop her head. Men are always telling her she looks like Khaleesi, a character from âGame of Thrones,â a line she thinks is cheesy.  Her friend Lauren McElver has a name for the kind of guys whoâd use a come-on like that. She calls them âChads and Brads,â thinking the names unfashionable.  âYou can tell just by looking at them,â said Ms. McElver, 23, an aspiring screenwriter. âYou see a guy wearing a Polo, like the âJersey Shoreâ look. Itâs like âGo back to Jersey!âÂ You can tell theyâre not from Minneapolis by what theyâre wearing, the way they talk,â Ms. McElver said. âIf youâre from Minneapolis, you donât act like that.â  Rachelle Horowitz, a 22-year-old student and makeup artist, said that she doesnât like it âwhen a guy gets all up on me dancing.â That sort of thing mostly happens downtown, they agreed, an area that they said is characterized by $15 cocktails and women in short sequined skirts.  Uptown guys, they said, tend to be musicians or artists living in neighborhoods like Whittier, where rents are cheaper. In other words, hipsters.  âWe hate on hipsters, but we all dress like them,â Ms. McElver said.  While their counterparts in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, or the Silverlake neighborhood of Los Angeles are defined (and derided) for their blasÃ© pose, their Twin Cities brothers and sisters, while blessed with the same clunky glasses, working-class-chic attire and fixed-gear bikes, retain the openness and generosity of the region.  You can see it at Worldwide Discotheque, a Friday-night dance party at Club JÃ¤ger. The crowd â gay, straight, black, white â may look too cool for school, but when the D.J.âs spin a mix of Afro-pop and â70s soul, attendees dance without self-consciousness, some bringing baby powder to make the floor slick and facilitate James Brown-style slides.Â âMinnesota Nice,â that affectionately mocking appellation, shines through even the densest layers of flannel.  As for Mr. Wayne, he had inch-wide plugs stretching his earlobes and a tattoo of a cartoon angel on one side of his neck and a cartoon devil on the other. He sported white-rimmed glasses and a trucker hat tagged with the word âZAP.â As he set out in this night after âpre-gamingâ with a handle of Jameson and a growler of beer at home, he threw a red kaffiyeh around his neck to complete his look.  He and some friends were planning to move on to their next destination: the CC Club, a spot on South Lyndale that was recently the subject of a cover article in City Pages, a weekly newspaper, about its long, boozy history in the cityâs music scene. (Itâs the bar immortalized in the Replacementsâ song âHere Comes a Regular.â)  With Mr. Wayne were his roommate, Andrew Zachman, 30, a 3-D modeler of hearing aids; Katelin Craig, 24, a sous-chef; Kathleen Barnhart; 25, a teacher; Steve Kneeland, 30, a network engineer who occasionally dragged on an e-cigarette; Brandon Ward, 37 and self-employed; and Michael Fangman, 24, an advertising art director.  Mr. Wayne was aware that this merry little band was a temporary configuration.  âEverybody wants to couple up with somebody and spend the rest of their life with that person,â he said. âBut how do we get to that point?â  He believes that âwomen my age are too busy having a career, having a job, not really having fun.â  âIâm sorry,â he continued, âIâve had money, Iâve lost it. Iâd just rather be happy.â  And what would constitute happiness? âI do want to get a house, settle down. I want a garden. I want to be able to travel and do other stuff. And I do want that other person.â
In Minneapolis, a merry little band of creative friends is aware that membership may be fleeting if love calls.