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The Guys @ DCGreeks.com ask: Speed Dating at the YAL DC Greek Night? What’s
up with that? Many of you have probably seen the wave of emails going around DC publicizing this weekend’s YAL Washington, DC Weekend. We here at DCGreeks.com have done our part as well to raise the hype about this weekend, posting details on our Events Calendar, our Fall Preview, and even that little banner that most of you see scrolling past your screen right now. One thing that popped out at us in reading the latest round of emails was a quick sentence regarding the Greek Night at Ooh La La on Friday. For those of you who may have missed this detail, figuring you’d seen enough emails on the YAL DC Weekend, it mentioned something rather interesting that they are trying to organize during the middle of this Greek Night -- Speed Dating. Now
Speed Dating, as it usually works, involves a bunch of guys and a bunch of girls
taking turns talking to one another for a certain time limit.
We hear that these speed dates usually last about seven minutes, giving a
guy and a girl plenty of time to get to know each other before the timer goes
off and they have to move on to the next person.
The goal of this is pretty obvious – if you talk to someone for a few
minutes and there’s some sort of spark there that can be differentiated
between every other seven minute conversation you had that night, it’s
probably not a bad idea to go up to talk to that person some more after the game
has ended. The
concept of Speed Dating is interesting in and of itself, but it becomes a social
science experiment to witness when you add Greeks as the test subjects and the
uncontrolled environment of a Greek Night to the mix.
A forced interaction between the sexes at a Greek Night may be something
that DC needs to loosen things up a bit. This
is assuming of course that you can get willing participants.
The one thing that we’ve noticed here at DCGreeks.com
is that Greeks
are deathly afraid of admitting that they would even use anything that they see
as “gimmicky,” or even worse anything that could make them seem in the least
bit “desperate” to meet someone. Greek-Americans
somehow expect to meet someone without ever admitting that they are actually
looking to meet someone. How
is that ever going to work? As far
as this Speed Dating thing goes, we predict that there will be more guys than
girls participating with the ratio panning out somewhere at 57% guys to 43%
girls. Assuming
you get a good number of Greek guys and girls ready to participate, be it
through peer pressure, alcohol, or a genuine desire to be a good sport and have
fun with it, the actual results will vary between guys and girls.
Everyone knows that Greek guys suffer from Attention Deficit Disorder
when thrown into an environment where they get over-stimulated by the sheer
number of beautiful Greek girls at a Greek Night.
This phenomena gets multiplied when adding for the possibility that there
will be quite a number of new faces at an event as big as YAL DC Weekend.
Greek Guys’ heads will surely be turning more times that a nuclear
powered gyro machine. It may be
impossible for a Greek guy to sit down and talk to the same girl for 7 minutes
without either looking at the girl he’ll be talking to next or looking at the
girls not playing. What
will it be like to actually be in one of these Speed Dating sessions?
Sometimes the organizers provide a set of canned questions to serve as
ice breakers. We’re not sure if
this is the format they’ll be following on Friday Night.
Seeing as these are Greeks participating in Speed Dating, we suggest a
sampling of the following questions: 1) What do you do? 2)
How much money do you make? 3)
What do you drive? 4)
Do you still live with your parents? 5)
What do your parents do? 6)
Why is your cousin/parea staring at me while I’m talking to you?
Regardless
of having questions provided in advance or not, there are a few classic
exchanges that we can see happening. For
the sake of simplicity, we will present these in dialogue form between our DCGreeks.com Players, Maria, George,
Eleni and Nick, because surely there will be at
least one Maria, George, Eleni and
Nick
participating.
Speed
Date 1: Maria:
Hi, I’m Maria. George:
Hi Maria, I’m George, nice to meet you. Maria:
What do you do? George:
I work in my parents restaurant. What
do you do? Maria:
I’m pursuing my doctorate degree in Biochemistry.
George:
Um, I don’t understand what that is, but um, yeah, I gotta go.
Speed
Date 2: Nick:
Hey, how’s it going? I’m
Nick. Eleni:
Nick? I’m Eleni.
Nick:
My sister’s named Eleni. Eleni:
So where are you from? Nick:
I’m from Bethesda, what about you?
Eleni:
I’m from {Cell phone rings.} Hold
on a second…. Hello? Hey!
Yeah… Yeah…
Really?… Wow…
Uh huh… Uh huh…
Cool. TIME'S
UP!
Speed
Date 3: Nick:
Hey, how’s it going? I’m
Nick. Maria:
Maria. Nice to meet you.
Nick:
My sister’s named Maria. Maria:
What do you do? Nick:
I work in a restaurant. Hahahaha,
just kidding, I’m a stock broker. Maria:
You have a great laugh. Nick:
Really? Will you marry me? Maria:
Now you’re making me laugh. That
was a joke right? Nick:
No, I’m serious. Maria:
Hey, I think it’s time to move on to the next person.
Nick:
Wait, wait, come back.
Speed
Date 4: Eleni:
(Still on cellphone) Ok,
bye. (Hangs up)
Hey, where’d the other guy go? George:
I don’t know. I’m George. Eleni:
Hey George, what’s up? George:
Not much, how are you? Eleni:
I’m ok. So what do you do?
George:
I work in my parents’ restaurant.
Eleni:
That’s cool. I’m still in school. I
don’t know what I want to do with my life yet.
George:
Yeah, one day when my parents retire, I’ll own the restaurant.
Eleni:
I love you.
Let’s
hope for everyone’s sake that these Speed Dates on Friday night don’t follow
any of these patterns. We’re not
sure if anything long term will come of these Speed Dating sessions, but if
there are any success stories, we’re sure everyone would like to hear about
them at The Kafenio. In
any event, Speed Dating should at least make this Greek Night more interesting
than the typical run-of-the-mill Greek Night and should serve as a good kickoff
event for the YAL DC Weekend.
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