"We're just excited to explore a new city," Nina tells Westword.
"Yes, excitement is the word," Danny adds. They're both on the phone at Danny's parents' house, and it's sweet, like chatting with Mom and Pops.
Danny and Nina have just taken a tour of swanky hotels in Miami, and now they're spending time with family before coming to Denver, where one million fans yearn to run into them at a Nuggets game or Bright Channel show. After they figure out who the hell Danny and Nina are, that is.
Here's the rundown. Danny and Nina met in Manhattan, and their e-project, DannyAndNina.com, is what happens when an artist and an Internet marketing major fall in love and decide they're ready to move to a new town. Instead of checking out some cold Forbes survey for a list of top U.S. cities, Danny and Nina built a website where people could vote on the town that best matched their interests, choosing from a list of 250 possibilities. Danny, for example, needs to live in a place with Thai food and indie pop, and without lizards. Nina, the painter, simply can't be without a good art scene, and she also enjoys snowboarding. The couple promoted the site through press releases and on MySpace; they even set up a donation option through PayPal so that viewers could contribute to Danny's Thai food fund. But from there, it wasn't just a matter of watching the votes roll in. To keep people coming back to the site, they posted hipster-friendly blogs daily about whatever caught their fancy -- Harry Potter, politics, Jarvis Cocker...
"We're artistic people, and we just wanted to collaborate on something. The success or failure of the project is determined by peoples' responses to it," explains Danny.
As for the overall response, the project collected about five million international votes, as well as a wild array of comments representing the wide spectrum of human behavior. In fact, you could learn a lot about man just from studying the nominations for Plano, Texas.
One German TV host urged viewers to vote for Plano as a joke, since Danny and Nina had vowed to live in the winning town for at least one year. According to that snarky host, Plano is hellhole enough to be funny. Then South Bend, Indiana, took the lead, and five or six articles in the local newspaper spawned an ugly fight about the merits and drawbacks of that town. "Locals are now debating whether this mid-sized, Midwestern city is pretty enough for educated, artistic and adventuresome people," read one such article in the South Bend Tribune.
On the last nerve-racking day of voting, the town in the lead changed several times. Finally, Denver became the winner, grabbing more than one million votes. And what does that say about human nature?
Well...that some humans have good taste.
After the winner was announced, one blogger urged Danny and Nina to "check out the beautiful new art museum." Another reader requested that they shovel her street.
"The best responses were spontaneous," says Danny. "People would e-mail us to say, ŒYou really have to move here, because we have this great coffee shop.' It was really kind of sweet."
As a result, Danny and Nina may be better educated on Denver's hot spots than Denverites (for coffee, totally check out Hooked on Colfax), despite their never having wandered beyond DIA. "It resonates, because people are really proud of where they come from," says Nina.
Now Danny and Nina are ready to start part two of their project: experiencing a new city -- they move this week -- and blogging about it to a captivated audience that stretches from Europe to Australia.
"This is about civic pride, but a lot of people like the fact that we're a couple," says Danny. "It's a romantic adventure, full of uncertainty. No one knows what we'll go through, but in the end, we'll have done it together."
And in Denver.
