Height-advantaged people can gather at Tall Tour meetup in Minneapolis
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Tall people can find community at a Minneapolis event next week.
Tall Tour makes its first stop in Minnesota on Oct. 16, with a meetup at Tom’s Watch Bar in downtown Minneapolis. The event series is known nationwide for gathering the vertically gifted and being a space where they blend in.
“When I first started out, it was almost like an out-of-body experience,” founder Tyler Bergantino said. “It was very surreal to be in a crowd where everybody was — it sounds so weird, but — just face-to-face.”
How the Tall Tour came to be
Bergantino, who is 6-foot-9, said the concept started as content for social media over a year ago. When traveling in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, he made a post inviting tall people to meet up for on-camera interviews. The resulting videos performed well. More and more people showed up when he made similar invites in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
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“I thought it was something I could do when I go to these cities, but the demand was so strong that I was like, ‘OK, we got to actually plan it out like a tour,’” he said.
Bergantino now organizes events across the country with Julie Pirrone, who is 5-foot-11, running logistics.
Event gives tall people a place to connect
While being taller than average comes with some privilege, they told MPR News about downsides.
“Puberty is already hard, but gosh, when I was 6 feet, 7 inches in eighth grade, that was tough,” Bergantino said. “I was a circus animal, basically, at school.”
“I was always stopped at the grocery store, like, ‘Oh wow, you must play basketball,’” Pirrone said. “I was not able to shop in normal stores because anytime I would try to buy a pair of jeans or sweatpants, they came up to my calf.”
At Tall Tour, they said, attendees can find tips on where to shop, befriend fellow giants and feel normal.
What to expect at Tall Tour Minneapolis
The Minneapolis meetup marks Tall Tour’s expansion into the Midwest beyond Chicago. Other stops include Milwaukee, Indianapolis and Kansas City, Mo.
“Apparently, this is where the tallest people in the country are, by rumor,” Bergantino said.
The event in Minneapolis will include the typical crowning of the tallest man and woman as king and queen, as well as social time, music and themed drinks. Among those are a huge-o spritz, margari-tall and XXL espresso martini.
Despite the name, Tall Tour is open to people of all sizes. Bergantino aims for events to be inclusive, acknowledging someone may be the tallest in their family without actually being that tall, and that tall people may have short loved ones.
Tickets to the Minneapolis event start at $25. Attendees must be 21 or older.
Tall Tour’s app VIP — short for Vertically Inclined People — has a minimum height requirement of 5-foot-8 for women and 6-foot-1 for men. Pirrone said the app, which launched this summer, features a height-verified community with discounts on tall brands and space for locals to connect.
