So after months of careful consideration (read: laziness), I finally attended my first speed dating event this past weekend. The venue happened to be in the Meatpacking District...during Gay Pride. Evidently, no one thought this through.
Our group spanned two areas--a bar and a semi-private (read: quiet) back room. I was super-fortunate enough to be seated at the bar (very close to the revelers) where my "dates" had to stand near me (since there were no adjacent seats for them) and yell me their names/interests over the din of 50 queens singing and dancing to Ke$ha or Katy Perry. More amusing was the hostess' use of her bell, which she rang every 5 minutes to signal a new rotation to the next speed-dater. The ringing of the bell, of course, served as a different signal to the Proud clientele, prompting them to clap and whistle, and to exclaim some variation of "WOOOOOO HOOOOOO! PARTTTYYYYYY DOWWNNNNNNN, BITCHES!"
Here are some memorable quotes:
"You are very good. I am going to check YES next to your name."
"You must've been born here because your English is superb."
"Is there some kind of event happening in the city? What are all these rainbow flags? Was there a Dominican parade today?"
All in all, I'd say it was 2 parts fun, 1 part boring, and only .5 part demoralizing so....SUCCESS! Maybe next time, it'll be at a Chuck-E-Cheese.
Funny, we just did speed dating at work today. But not for actual dating-- just to meet team members visiting from other offices etc. We had 40 people in a small room with poor acoustics and at any moment in time roughly half of them were speaking. It was kind of awful.
ReplyDeleteBut apparently you're "good" and your English is "superb" so that sounds pretty _moralizing_ if you ask me. Did you get any matches?
*ahem*
ReplyDeletei was "very good" and yes, a couple of matches did peek through. we shall see....
LOL. Truly awesome mashup of speed-dating and Gay Pride week. I'm happy you gave it a shot, and that it turned out to be not terribly horrendous.
ReplyDeleteAt least someone thought your English was "superb." When I was working in Japan, a non-native English speaker actually said to me: "You must have studied abroad. Your English isn't that bad."