The Pandemic Pretzel Social Club originated in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. A group of live concert aficionados, bummed by having to stay home and not see live music, decided to ask some musicians that they knew to perform for them on Zoom in exchange for a fee and tips.
The musicians, having been suddenly deprived of their livelihood by the pandemic were more than happy to sign up. This quickly became a regular weekly event on Saturday evenings, with a different musician each time, attended by about ten to twenty audience members. The typical "concert" would start in the early evening with a half hour of people joining and chatting with each other, then the musician would join and once they started playing, everyone would mute themselves to eliminate distractions. Once a song ended, the audience would unmute and applaud, which the musicians absolutely loved because most of them were going through withdrawals of not having attention being paid to them. Typically the music went for about an hour, and then the musician usually left, leaving the members to chat amongst themselves for an hour or more until they dropped off one by one to stumble to bed in some degree of drunkenness.
Some musicians wanted a fee which was usually covered by a few key group members and there was always a link to the musician's PayPal or Venmo account for people to send tips to.
Because the founding members of the group are hard core fanatical fans of the alt-country band The Old 97s, many of the musicians were either members of that band, or members of bands that had previously opened for them.
Why Pretzels? Two of the participants, who live in Minnesota, had been in the habit of going to local breweries to drink beer and eat soft pretzels. When they couldn't do that any more they started baking their own pretzels for the Saturday night concerts and that became a thing that some of the other participants also did. When coming up for a name for the group, that became part of it.
Since the time we were able to crawl out of our holes and see people in person again, we have been meeting at various concerts and music cruises. We still have the occasional Zoom concert.