WELCH AVENUE — It’s Friday night.

Not last Friday. Not next Friday. Just Friday.

You’re on Welch Avenue, of course. Where else could you be, but on this block of this street in this town on this night?

Stand under the clock tower and survey the scene. Music from Smiles & Gyros mingles with the laughing conversation of the line outside Paddy’s. An ISU Police officer chats with a crowd in the Kum & Go parking lot and in the distance, the Moonlight Express rumbles down Lincoln Way.

Between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., the crowd swells and subsides, as revelers pace in their best button-up shirts or cotton skirts, stumbling or smoking or speaking into their cell phones, “Hello? Hello? I’m on Welch, where are you?”

Look at what they do — what we do. We buy drinks for people we don’t know. We stand in line for food our taste buds are too numb to taste. We get drunk, fight, cry, laugh, drunk dial, smoke, vomit, laugh more, drink more, misunderstand and understand each other so deeply.

Even if only for a few hours, we live a life that can’t be found in the textbooks, lectures and organizations on campus. We live a life that we suspect will be impossible in just a few months or years, when it comes time to, you know, settle down.

The Daily was there for one such Friday. Six reporters and four photographers embedded themselves in the establishments of Welch Avenue and its peripherals — the bars, sandwich lines, drunk buses and cop cars — and came away with a record of the lives led on these nights.

What they saw was as varied as the people who inhabit this street — from brawls and public urination to fresh-baked bread and Tippy Cup. It was just an average Friday night on Welch Avenue.

But that’s exactly what made it unique.

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