'Too Fast for Love'

A man once approached Donna Perkins and asked her for a quarter. Puzzled, the single mother asked why she should give him her change, to which he replied, "I told my mother I would call her when I met the woman of my dreams."

Bad pick-up lines, noisy bars and even noisier drunks aside, Perkins simply doesn't have the time to play guessing games or solve one-line riddles in bars. So when Cindy Brown first approached Perkins, who works night and day shifts for the police department, and asked "Are you single," in a word she was apprehensive. After attending one of Brown's Rendezvous speed-dating services, Perkins has paid for the next one in advance.

"You met people you would not ordinarily meet," says a bubbly Perkins. "You know, somebody you might not give five minutes to in a bar, you were forced to sit down and spend 12 minutes with them. And it is an eye-opener because you learn a lot about yourself as well as the other people there. You get to talk to somebody one on one without distractions ... and you are not having the drunks around you and the this and that. It was actually a very mild time."

Listening to Brown, you might almost think that she started Rendezvous for Perkins. Every peeve that Perkins cites about meeting someone is a foundation for her service, which brings together singles, sits them down at a table and has them get to know each other before moving to the next waiting romance hopeful.

"I've heard complaints that it is hard to find a quality person to date in the usual places," says Brown. "Some people just don't like the idea of meeting people in bars. It's usually loud and not very conducive to just getting to know one another, unless you don't mind shouting over the crowd and the music. One of the guys at my second Rendezvous told me that he liked my event because he was shy and would have a hard time approaching someone at a bar and just talking with them. But at Rendezvous, the way it works is that each male gets time to visit one on one with each female there. That's the way it is done, so nobody has to make the first move on their own."

Since Rendezvous fired up in October, Brown has brought 29 singles together in hopes of sparking amoré. By the end of the night, each single has become a little more familiar with a few members of the opposite sex. So far, no one has reported finding Mr. or Ms. Right, but numbers have been exchanged, so there is hope. There's plenty more waiting in the wings, as Brown reports more than 70 singles have signed up with her free membership service. The age-range of those 70 is varied, so many of them have not been contacted for an event because few members are in their age group. To alleviate their loneliness, Brown plans to offer a party where all age groups are welcome.

Speed-dating might seem like a silly way to meet a mate, but in today's rushed world of little patience for anything that is not instant, professionals just don't have the time to meet folks the old-fashioned way.

"I like to go out and have a beer every once in a while and go dancing and stuff. It's just, by the end of my day, I am just too damn exhausted," Perkins says of her busy schedule. She's not alone: since it first appeared in New York City, capital city of the hustle-bustle nation, the concept, also known as pre-dating, has spread across the country and hopped the Atlantic to the United Kingdom, where clubs like XDate offer speed dating in London, Manchester and Leeds.

Brown, hitched for 27 years, first contemplated the service years ago, before the media and television shows, such as Yes, Dear, began buzzing about it.

Unlike the majority of other clubs, where singles meet in bars, pubs or taverns, she started her service in a coffee shop - Café Rue Vermilion - where she said singles could meet quietly without all the clatter of the bar scene. Since then, Rendezvous has relocated to Stan's Night Club. Her friends, mostly a flock of single women, inspired the idea with their tales of impossible odds in noisy bars.

"I started thinking that having a small group of singles who could sit and talk and sort of get to know a little bit about each other would be a good way for them to meet and find out if they wanted to date one another," Brown says.

She sat on the idea for a while and ironed out the kinks of people's natural shyness. Knowing that when they came together, there would be nervousness and a tendency to clam up, she developed ice-breaker activities and questionnaires to get the ball rolling.

At first, Perkins admits her Rendezvous experience was like the eighth-grade dance with boys on one sides and girls on the other. But by the time Perkins sat down with a suitor she was giggling, and not because he was asking for a quarter.

"Basically at first it was like a job interview," she says. "But fun."