I took the PDA and jumped around the site a little. “Bingo!”
“You get some names?”
“No. Even better. Look, a seminar is being held tonight.” I glanced at my watch. “It’s starting now. We have to get downtown. If we grab a cab, we can walk right in.”
“A seminar? What sort of seminar?” Matt called. I was already moving through the crowd and into the street, raising my right arm high.
“Some sort of dating guru seminar thing,” I yelled over my shoulder. “It’s held once a month at the big auditorium at the New School. Taxi!”
We caught a cab and drove down to the corner of the Avenue of the Americas and Twelfth Street, then walked half a block to the New School of Social Research at 66 West Twelfth.
As we talked over our final plans, we walked by a building under renovation. Matteo stopped dead in front of a shocking poster plastered to a plywood construction barricade.
The huge poster displayed an image of a woman’s naked torso, her breasts shaded by the discrete placement of an arm. Bold black lines had been drawn all over her flesh as if she were a cow, the lines delineating various cuts of meat — shoulder, loin, ribs, chops, shank, etc.
“Jesus, I hope this isn’t an advertisement for the dating seminar we’re going to,” said Matteo. “I heard it was a meat market out there, but I never took the term quite so literally.”
“Very funny.”
I glanced at the poster and saw it had nothing to do with the SinglesNYC site seminar. It was advertising a Meat No More charity lingerie show at the Puck Building later tonight. I shuddered, remembering Brooks Newman and his “genius” scheme as the new director of fundraising for that vegan group. It looked like he’d pulled it off.
I wasn’t sharing my recognition with Matt, however, because I wasn’t all that keen on conveying how Newman had turned our innocent little Cappuccino Night playgroup into a playgrope.
“Let’s go,” I said.
The foyer to the New School’s main building was busy and brightly lit. I approached the information desk, where a bored student tried to study his notes despite constant interruptions.
“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m looking for — ”
“SinglesNYC? End of the hall, turn right, and go to the tables for registration. Look for the ‘Pull the Plug’ sign.”
Did I look that desperate? Or was it simply assumed that every single woman in New York City was man-hungry and on the make?
The seminar was already underway, so there were no lines at the registration table. On a stand was a large placard that read PULL THE PLUG with a cartoon of a trendy couples kissing over a computer tossed into a garbage can.
“Are you a registered member of SinglesNYC? If you are, there’s a thirty percent discount to hear Trent and Granger,” said a perky young woman wearing muddy brown lipstick and a short matching dress with a neckline even lower than the one I’d worn for Bruce.
“No,” said Matteo. “We’re not registered members.”
“Yes, actually,” I admitted.
Matteo looked at me in stunned surprise. “You have been busy while I was away.”
I ignored Matteo and gave the woman my e-mail address and she cross-checked it on a laptop. I felt like grabbing the computer and fleeing into the night, certain that all the information I needed was imprinted inside of that little machine’s drive. But nothing in life is that easy, and I’d probably get caught halfway down the block with the heels I was wearing.
“Clare Cosi? Welcome to ‘Pull the Plug: Freeing Yourself from the Mouse,’” she said, handing me a brochure. “That will be forty dollars.”
I sighed.
Here I stood in the hallways of the New School, a haven for academics and literati since World War I, the 1930s East Coast nexus for intellectuals and scientists fleeing the Nazis. Within this school’s sphere, luminaries such as William Styron, Edward Albee, Robert Frost, Arthur Miller, and Joyce Carol Oates had taught or lectured, along with cranky, controversial iconoclasts like psychologist Wilhelm Reich and psychedelic guru Timothy Leary.
And what amazing lecture was I about to hear? “Trent” and “Granger” talking about how to pick up the opposite sex without the crutch of a Web site.
I paid cash.
Low-neckline Girl turned to Matteo and asked if he wanted to register as well. My ex didn’t answer immediately — the woman’s cleavage and full lips had momentarily distracted him.
Luckily, my elbow to his ribs solved this dilemma.
The auditorium was large enough for a thousand people, but less than two hundred were crowded together in the first ten or twelve rows, over two-thirds of them female. Almost all the audience members looked to be over thirty and under fifty.
As we found seats close to the stage, Matteo complained incessantly that he had to pay sixty dollars to gain admission.
“You could feed a Kenyan family for six months on sixty bucks.”
“Hush and you might learn something.”
He shot me a look that said “I doubt it,” but he shut up for the moment.
On stage was a tall man with dark, floppy, Hugh Grant hair and thin lips. He wore a tight black shirt, open at the neck, black slacks, and a charcoal gray Italian silk jacket. He moved with confidence, and as he spoke he drifted back and forth across the stage, addressing audience members as if they were the focus of his lecture.
“So far we’ve covered the rules of engagement and how important they are,” he said into a microphone. “And how those vitally important rules get trashed in most on-line hook-ups. Now we all remember rule number one, right?”
The man next to him — shorter and a little stout, with tiny dark-rimmed glasses and a round face — hit the button on his power pointer and a phrase appeared on a large blank screen behind them. On cue, the audience read along like it was karaoke night.
“Not all of the Creator’s children are beautiful,” the audience chanted.
“And rule number two?” Matteo whispered. “These guys are total grifters.”
“So how do you know if they’re hot or not,” continued the man on stage, “if you don’t meet them in the flesh? Is she a Monica or a Hillary? Is he Prince Andrew or Homer Simpson? The dirty little secret is that you’ll never know if you meet them in a chat room. But you will know if you meet them in the flesh.”
He emphasized the last words with what he thought was an erotic thrust of his pelvis — but this guy was no Elvis. Beside me, Matteo let out a disgusted sigh.
“That’s why I’m here. My name’s Trent. And this money dude right next to me is Granger. Granger and I have sacrificed our Saturday night to provide you with a guaranteed map through the minefield of real-time, face-to-face hook-ups.”
Trent stepped closer to the edge of the stage and lowered his voice an octave.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we call it dating without the Net — it’s real, it’s risky, but the rewards are well worth the hassles. I’m asking you to try, at least for a little while, pulling the plug on that computer. Douse that mouse. Be the player with all the right cards in your hand and you’ll come up a winner every time — and find a better love life than you ever dreamed possible.”
“I can’t believe this,” Matteo complained in my ear. “They’re teaching supposedly urbane, sophisticated, well-educated New Yorkers how to hook up with the opposite sex? Some of us figured that one out in high school.”
“You figured it out in the sixth grade,” I whispered.
Matteo frowned. “I told you about Maggie?”
A thirty-something woman in the row in front of us turned, and I’m pretty sure she intended to shush us. But when she laid eyes on my ex, her resolve seemed to weaken — as well as her knees. She glanced flirtatiously at Matt, then gave me a nasty look.
“He’s all yours, honey,” I murmured.
Matt glanced at me, and we both laughed.