THE
SINGLES DATING SCENE
1992
Not long ago I attended a surprise birthday party for my friend JoAnna
Cox (no relation). Mike Siem and I went to Kroger just minutes before
kickoff to pick up a present of some sort. Nieman Marcus closed at
8, what could we do?
I
picked out a box of modeling clay and an awesome book: Shake-A-Leg, featuring
trademarked Sesame Street characters, that anyone would've been envious
of. Anyhow, on the way out, I picked up some of the "FREE!! TAKE
ONE!" magazines to garnish the gift with. I got Houses for Rent,
Better Homes, FunEd (yeah, right.) and The Fort Worth Singles Guide.
The FW Singles Guide proved to be more enjoyable than anything else.
After the initial party festivities, Mike and I read over the ads.
We soon recognized key phrases to avoid:
"Queen-sized Woman"
"Womanly Sized"
There
was even one that said, "Looking for a man who's more interested in my
mind than how my body looks." But she's got a great personality!!!...
Another area of interest was the classification indexes. One of the
more amusing indexes was "DF/D", which meant "drug-free and/or disease-free".
Really? Let's focus on this "and/or" bit. Does that mean that
you could be a syphilitic leper but not smoke and be able to use this classification?
It could be that Mary really has Gonorrhea, but because she abstains from
crack, she can use this classification under the "or" assumption.
Now here's the kicker--not ONE ad in the whole magazine, not one solitary
ad used this index. Since one only has to fulfill HALF of the
requirements to be "DF/D" (because of the and/or clause), we can therefore
infer that everyone in that magazine had a disease AND did some kind of
drugs. Mike and I found this beyond laughable applause.