Blind dates dine over Dolci dinner True love blossomed at the second annual Proctor event

Author: Cecilia Goldschmidt

Eighty-eight students met at Proctor Dining Hall last Friday in search of new faces, lasting relationships and great food in this year's first and the second ever. Blind Date Dolci. SGA committee members matched students based on questionnaires they filled out alongside their applications.

The consensus seems to be that finding true love was really not the main goal of the event. As organizers David Dolginow '09 and Frances Conrad '09 agreed, it was simply a "silly thing to do on a Friday evening." Dolginow and Conrad organized the event with the Social Affairs Committee of the Student Government Association (SGA) and Dolci, the College's only student-run restaurant.

The inaugural Blind Date Dolci was a success last year, and, as a result, 150 students applied for spots this year. The applicants answered questions ranging from, "What decade do you belong in?" to "If you were trapped on a desert island with one movie, which would it be?"

Dolginow and Conrad read through the applications and paired up the couples however they saw fit. They maintain that they truly did not try to create any funny or unfitting couples, such as setting up unsuspecting first-year girls with senior guys who had circled "Date?! Straight to the bedroom" on their applications.

"Proctor will probably be really romantic," Jessie Kissinger '10 said about an hour before she headed over to meet her date. When asked what her expectations were for her night of dinner and conversation with a guy on campus whom she had potentially never met, Kissinger answered, "I don't know what to expect at all. I'm going to go in thinking it will be funny and awkward. Maybe the group tables will alleviate the awkwardness?"

Indeed, it seems that "funny" and "awkward" were the most commonly used words to describe the event. Emily Jones '10 applied for Blind Date Dolci expecting it to be "an awkward but fun way of meeting a new person," later adding, "Maybe it will turn out that we will be best friends for life." Jones' preparation for the event was a minimal three-step routine, "shower and shave and floss," she said.

Proctor was set up special for the night with 11 round tables covered with tablecloths and adorned with candles. This setup of group tables rather than individual tables for each couple allowed for groups of friends to sit together, therefore making the atmosphere much more casual and relaxed. Surprisingly enough for such a small college, out of the ten couples interviewed, none of them had ever met each other before Blind Date Dolci.

After meeting their dates, students sat down to a five-course gourmet meal, including chocolate covered strawberries, oysters, salad, pasta with vodka sauce, ribs, chocolate torte and peach pie.

Chris Sesno '09 said that when he first met up with his date, Abby Blum '08.5, "There were sparks in my eyes." Blum was also pleased, "We've been getting along so well it's unreal, you'd never know we hadn't ever met each other…Frances and Dave are very talented matchmakers," she said.

Similarly, Julia Fraser '07 and Ben Shapiro '09 affirmed that they had both exceeded each other's expectations. While Shapiro's expectations were simply that he hoped he would be "able to talk to the person for more than five minutes," he and Fraser were talking and laughing as if they were old friends, Shapiro proudly stating, "She's only slapped me like five or six times." When asked if he was going to ask Fraser for her number at the end of the night, Shapiro said that he hoped that she would give it to him, to which Fraser replied, "Maybe."

While it seems as if the general feeling on campus is that the dating scene at Middlebury College is, as Shane Spinell '08 put it, "pretty nonexistent," Blind Date Dolci was a fun opportunity for students to get dressed up, eat gourmet food and meet each other in an environment a little bit classier than a sweaty dance party. At the end of the night, it appeared that all of the participants had a thoroughly enjoyable time. Kissinger and Jones, who had been paired up with Eamon Duffy '09.5 and Austin Ogilvie '09.5, excitedly declared that at their table they had met "a cowboy, a pilot, a firefighter and a couple sky divers." For those who missed out on it this time, the SGA is planning to organize another Blind Date Dolci for this spring.