Maybe you’ve tried speed dating, but have you ever tried a speed dating event where you match with a guy dressed as Pauly Shore dressed as Cupid… or Jesus?
This Sunday, Oct. 8, local comedians June Dempsey and Hillary Boston will host the novelty speed dating event Unhinged Speed Dating at Against the Grain from 3-5 p.m. Tickets are $15, and readers can use the code “LEO” to get a 20% discount.
Unhinged Speed Dating, the third event of its kind so far, has elements of traditional speed dating you get a short amount of time to talk to a rotation of other participants one-on-one about yourself and your interests; at the end of the event, you give the hosts a card with the assigned numbers of guests you liked, and they share your contact info if it was a mutual match.
This event, however, is far from traditional. Some of the elements that give it its Unhinged moniker include:
- Some of the participants are characters played by local comedians (or their friends); at the February event, those included The Complimenter, who walked around giving participants encouragement; “Pauly Shore/Cupid” (…yup); a guy who was celebrating eleven years of marriage in real life and gave relationship advice; a character named Granny; and Jesus.
- The questions and prompts are not necessarily the typical banal variants of tell me about yourself and the like; expect things like Draw the other person as a bird and What is the most fuckable dinosaur?
- When you register, you have to fill out a Google Form with your basic demographic info age, gender, the gender youre looking for, etc. You also have to submit the most unhinged image you have on your computer/phone, and the hosts project these memes on TV screens between question/prompt rounds.
- Rather than having only the men or only the women rotate after each round, the person with the higher number (assigned by the hosts) rotates each time. This reporter’s number at the February event was 74; one participant at my first table got the number -1,000,000.
That said, all of these were true in February; there may be variations at Sundays event after all, it wouldn’t be truly unhinged if it were fully predictable.
If you cant make this event, you may get another chance for some novelty speed dating later this year organizer June Dempsey told LEO that shes planning an anime-themed dating event at Kaiju in early December.
This article appears in September 27, 2023.
