All the Single Ladies…put your hands up!

I heard about a fun interactive dating event for singles through the woman who coordinated the speed-dating events I attended before and decided to check out with a friend. All I really knew about the event was there would be single people in attendance and a game was involved with locks and keys, and somehow you had to find your match. I was curious what it would be like and skeptical at the same time after my previous experiences speed-dating. On the way to the event it hit me I may run into some of the same people from speed-dating and if you remember from my prior posts there were some questionable characters. Oh boy, I thought. As we made our way down the street towards what we thought was the venue there was a buzz in the air. A few hundred feet in front of us was a beautiful art gallery where lively attractive people mingled inside. My friend looked at the map and pointed out we were at the wrong location and had to cross the street. As I gazed across the street there was a dark sort of alley where the real venue was located and we cautiously went down it. On the corner was a dark night club with red velvet ropes and men in all black suits guarded the door. We had to walk through floor length black velvet curtains to enter the place, the walls were painted bright red and there was little lighting, which made it hard to see what we had entered. It was at that moment I began to doubt what we were getting into. The place struck me as a different kind of venue and I pondered going back to the art gallery for a split second. Once inside, I realized it wasn’t as bad as it appeared. There were 75 or so people of all ages and races including a lot of Europeans. Shortly after, the coordinator was on stage to explain the game rules. I couldn’t help but notice a 15 foot painting of a naked woman with all natural body hair featured right above the stage. It was an eyesore and difficult to pay attention to the coordinator as she reviewed the rules. The game was set-up so men had keys and women had locks, the object was to find your match and once you did, you turned in your hardware (keys and locks) to get a new lock and you got raffle tickets for a chance to win a handful of prizes. Then you went back out to find your next match. The whole point of the game was to serve as an icebreaker for people to engage in conversation. While the idea was original and clever, it was weird. The whole process of a guy coming up to me to jam his key in my lock (while it was around my neck) and then moving along or striking up a conversation felt odd. It was uncomfortable and awkward. I looked around the room and noticed a few guys from prior speed-dating events. One in particular that stood out was the soft spoken school psychologist…you remember…the guy who spoke quietly out of the corner of his mouth and rarely made eye contact. He was the one who said he only goes to speed-dating events if its convenient to where he lives.  He came up to me and asked where he knew me from and suggested maybe we met at the ballet and my response was no, speed-dating. He then asked…in what city? Wow…he’s a regular!  I reminded him of the city and he tried his key in my lock…it was a match. Seriously? Out of everyone there I had a match to him. The night didn’t end there and read If you like it…then you should of put a key on it to see what other characters I ran into and hear more about the rest of the evening.

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Tags: Lock n key, single events, single ladies, singles