dating suggestions (no, really!)

Attention single ladies! I have a great place for us to move to: Manville, NJ! (Come on, how much fun would it be to say "I'm a single girl from Manville!")

Actually, no, what I do have is two great suggestions for a date: first, go to Chelsea and wander around looking at galleries (especially the Agora Gallery* which is showing work from Nathan Sawaya, a guy who depicts human conditions in Legos). You'll get a sense of what your date thinks about art and what his relationship to it is, and, if you play your cards right, you can stumble into a gallery serving wine and cheese, and get a free snack! (What I don't recommend is selecting the celery and pretzels, as chomping on those while meandering through other galleries is, well, noisy.) Yeah, ok, some of the art is ugly crap that looks like a shellacked version of forgotten goods from my vegetable drawer, but the Chelsea galleries are all free and have some amazing natural light and wood floors, too... if you're into that kind of thing. And, if need be, there are lots of nooks and crannies that I imagine you can smooch in, as long as you're fairly decent about it.

The second place to go was suggested to me by my Saturday date (or, "Saturdate," as I like to call him), and when he said it, I was worried that he was a little bit gay: Crate and Barrel! It's a great place to go sit on some comfortable sofas (not the wicker ones, they're ugly) and to just hang out. The staff encourages you to sit around -- thinking, of course, that you're there to register for your wedding when, in fact, you're on your fourth date -- and you don't have to buy anything or even look at anything. And it's a great place to see how into home stuff your date is. If you're me, and looking for a new spatula (to replace the one that broke its neck) and he's looking for an apple peeler/corer or excited about the mini salt and pepper grinders, you might just have a match.

(Sidenote -- there's a funny piece of furniture for sale in Crate and Barrel. It's smaller than a love seat, but bigger than a chair. It seated me and my date quite comfortably, but we're two slim people. Crate and Barrel calls it a "Chair and a Half"; we call it a "Like Seat.")

*don't follow the link if you're going to the exhibit. It'll ruin the surprise.