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EDITOR’S NOTE: Within one hour of this article being published, Dr. Phil’s team snapped into action. I am very impressed with their immediate reaction to the situation and their willingness to make up for it graciously and quickly. While they did acknowledge there had been some balls dropped, they (and I) believe the did all they could to make this event go smoothly in a small window of time. This is a TV show and having worked in TV myself in the past, I understand that stuff happens. A good percentage of the “matchees” involved did not make it to the studio in time. They had confirmed each person involved the day before. Two months of work had been put in to make this undertaking work. They also confirmed they had been unaware of the lack of follow through on perfectmatch’s side, and are taking steps to correct the situation. For this I award the staff of the DR. PHIL SHOW with the FIRST EVER CRACKPOT CLASS ACT AWARD, for those who rise above the common thought and try to make the world a better place. Mistakes are always made, how we deal with them defines us.
On additional note, I refer to someone in this article as ”not the most attractive woman I had ever seen.” I misarticulated. I was trying to make a point about how some people meet the societal aesthetic (see Bree, below, and all that comes with her) while others go unnoticed. This gal has an element of fun and spunkiness that is terribly sexy and in fact, should she read this, I would love to take her out to dinner. Happy Valentine’s Day ALL!
--Crackpot
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Make sure you check out Dave vs. Perfectmatch.com... the Perfectmatch.com people are down right.. terrible.
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Dave vs. Dr. Phil
By Dave, Edited by Debra Burleson
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It was Thanksgiving weekend, I was in town and had a great Thursday but then all of a sudden it was Saturday night and nothing was going on. I clicked on an online banner ad for www.perfectmatch.com saying, “Our Women Outnumber the Men 2 to 1.” What the hell, why not? So I decided to fill out this online profile for their dating site. It asks you to join but it was really expensive, so I decided to
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to lurk for a while instead. A few days later, this guy contacted me (which can be expected from time to time) and said he liked my profile (what happened to the 2 to 1 part?) and then said he will give me a few months free to try it out. That was some good marketing, and you have to respect that. Besides, it’s a free chance to meet a gal.
Now for the people living outside of Los Angeles, it has got to be one of the most god-awful towns to meet and date someone. Everyone is uber-busy, and scheduling a time to see even your closest friends takes an act of Congress. Even the people with no lives have yoga class four nights a week. It reminded me of when Louis Armstrong was once asked, “What is Jazz?” His answer – “If ya gotsta ask, you will never know.” It is the answer to many questions of life now, one of which is – “What is the dating scene like in LA?”
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A few weeks later the dating service marketing guy emails me again and says they want to hook me up with a gal on the Dr. Phil Show. All my life, I have always had a taste for sampling the strange, and this was definitely in the strange department. My answer (was “Sure, sounds like fun. Lemme know what’s up.” A few weeks later a producer contacts me to say they have someone specific to hook me up with and I should come to Paramount Studios for the show. I’m thinking it will be 10 guys and 10 girls. Cool. So I take the day off and get down there by 7:30 a.m.
After arriving at the studio, I get searched by security and led into the Soul Train soundstage. The irony being that this was more of a WASPy crowd and it was more of “No Soul” Train kinda group. As I’m standing there waiting, I begin to regret that I had decided to forgo the sports coat at the last second and now realize that wasn’t the best decision; it’s 40 degrees in this joint and it’s really freaking cold!
I take a look at the other guys. There about 15 others there and they are a collection of the biggest clods, losers, aging hipsters, nerds, inept and just plain dorks I have ever seen.
And now, I am one of them.
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My first thought was,Dear Go I am on the “So you wanna date a dweeb show?” These people think I am dweeb! Did they go looking for losers? I sweat it for about 20 minutes until some guys, whose weight I can punch, arrive and I start to breathe again. Apparently, I am the best looking guy in LA who can be on time or perhaps even a little early. Whew.
Now we have time to kill. We learn that this show taping is a surprise for the women so that’s why the men have to get there early. But none of us were prepared for a three-hour wait in 40
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degree temperatures. It was really freaking cold. In fact, I believe my testicles rolled up somewhere in the first 30 minutes.
We make the best of it and sort of form into cliques. I found a good bunch of guys and although we didn’t know each other, there is one thing that you can count on about guys. I don’t care how many operas you have been to, I don’t care how many Emily Dickenson poems you have read, I don’t care how often you are described as “sensitive” by the opposite sex. The easiest way to bond with men is right through the locker room doors.
One thing about internet dating – it’s like that 70’s board game Battleship. It’s a dance of hit and miss until someone finally, boldly, fearlessly proclaims “You sunk my Battleship.” One brilliant thing that internet dating has done is that it has given way to a whole new genre of stories.
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So while we waited on the Soul Train, we warmed up for the hook up dance by telling stories to each other. That was some of the most brilliantly foul stuff I had ever heard. Mike is the private high school teacher, an educated preppy kind of guy, who, by the way, I would have no problem introducing to my closest and best little sister, no guy-is-good-enough-for female friend. He tells this outrageous story about a woman he met on the site, who on the first date explains about how she wants to get
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pregnant. This is a really poor decision on her part for first date conversation. She further explains how she has a friend who is “Will” to her “Grace.” She insists he masturbates into a turkey baster...well, the rest of the story kind of writes itself.
I have to admit, I have never met a group of guys who instantly became fraternity brothers. I was having a great time. I hadn’t met new people in a long time and we were all men without a country, trying to make the best of it. We were all grateful that we were on Dr. Phil and not Jerry Springer or Maury or any other shotgun slam shows. However, our greatest fear was that they would introduce us to some great gal and we would go for a walk, crack each other up and then the show would really be called..”Hey, she’s a DUDE!” If that happened, we all pledged that we would insist on a free meal.
Although four hours is a lot of time to stand idly by, it was fun just shooting the shit with a bunch of strangers. I found that like me, because of careers, habits, and just getting older, we weren’t going to clubs and parties Wednesday through Fridays nights anymore. Instead, Friday night has turned into a good dinner or a movie with friends and turning in by 11 p.m. What was once effortless is now a hassle. As we told our stories, it was clear we all seemed guilt-free in this assessment.
By now the Dr. Phil producers line us up and give us each a rose to hand to a lady when we met her. There was a coordinator there who kept us occupied; she wasn’t the most attractive woman I have ever seen, but she had a spark and was definitely entertaining. That’s an underrated sexy quality in a woman. Many women forget that if we aren’t entertained, we aren’t having a good time and that’s why so many men in their 30’s own Playstations. She explains the mock faces we should make to have the audience cutaways be more interesting. The “how clever?” smile, the “that’s so interesting” frown. She hadn’t realized that we had practiced these expressions previously, on every first date we had ever been on.
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Meanwhile, I have to admit I am getting really curious about who this gal is going to be. I have been set up before and while it has never been disastrous, they have made me want to call the friend who thought we would be “perfect” together and ask, “I’ve known you for 10 years what do you really think of me?”
The producers line up a few people in a specific order and then throw the rest of us in random lines. This is when I began to feel the twist in my spine that told me I had been braving 40 degree temperatures for nothing. By this time, I am really looking forward to the hot lights in the studio.
So they lead the gals in while we are waiting backstage and Dr. Phil comes out and does his big reveal to them: “I am setting up the entire audience on a date!” They tell us all to run out and they play of the song “It’s Raining Men.”
Now there is one thing Dr. Phil should know...this song is THE gay anthem. If he was setting up a group of gay men for dates, this would be the ideal song to play. The actual mention of this tune puts even the most effeminate straight guy at ill-ease. And to top it off, once we get inside, we are still freezing and it’ hard to walk at this point because my testicles have been living in my stomach for the last three and a half hours.
The women are thrilled and overly-excited and of course, had jackets on. They’re dancing like they are at Chippendales show and had nothing but free singles to spend. This was one thing I found interesting and out of the ordinary because in LA most people are terribly blasé about everything. The Lakers won three straight championships and not even one decent riot; when UCLA won the basketball tournaments a few years back, in oh-so-WASPy Westwood, there was a looting problem...but only at the Gap.
These women were actually really enthusiastic about meeting a guy today, but the guys were a little too cool for the room. I think maybe we were all taken aback a bit by their enthusiasm which is something I have missed while dating in LA, more so than anywhere else. It would seem from this reaction that outside the greater metropolitan area, women actually get excited about a guy taking them out to dinner.
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Dr. Phil does his schpeal about dating and plays his version of theDating Game. The female contestants is ”Bree” (yes really Bree), an overly beautiful model/actress/real estate agent/waitress/whatever and three men. Personally, if I see a girl like that, I can sense the chill emanating from her soul. It’s like having a reproduction of a piece of art, great to look at but you know there is something counterfeit about it.
Case in point, Bree picks out one man, whose name I can’t remember. He was a doctor who likes to oil paint and travels enough to be fluent in three languages. When he’s first introduced, I turned to the guy sitting next to me and laughed, “This isn’t even fair. How are we supposed to compete with that?” I have often been quoted as saying that most single women in LA have impossibly high standards and won’t be satisfied until JFK Jr. swims up out of the ocean and whisks them away to Italy while paying off their car and Barney’s card in the process.
As I watch the Dr. Phil dating game it seems to me that this guy that Bree picked seemed like a pretty good guy. After she picks him, they go off backstage for a romantic dinner. Now Dr. Phil proclaims it’s time for us to meet our match “There is a name on the rose each man is holding. Go find your girl.” The second hint this was a scam for ratings - there was no name on my rose, unless of course I was meeting a gal named “1-800- Flowers.” Because of this screw up, the producers do a random shuffling of the audience to cover it up. They point me to a section of ladies, all of whom are at least 25 years older than I am. So I decide to give my flower to the oldest one there, a grandmotherly type named Ann. Sweet Gal. The producers look at the section and say this obviously wouldn’t do and sit me two more rows down..next to Dr. Phil’s wife, Robin, of all people! I hadn’t come looking for a meal ticket, but what the heck? They move me again next to gal who seemed a little disappointed by my arrival. Perhaps it was obvious I wasn’t in the correct tax bracket (a true Sixth Sense.. “I..see..middle class people”), I don’t know. She refused to really speak to me. To be fair, I think there were five couples who were actually set up for real, or as real as a TV show gets anyway.
We then check in with Bree, who just couldn’t seem to get into Dr. Oil Painting, a typical problem with LA women; no matter how good someone is, they won’t even give him a chance if he isn’t their Harlequin romance novel vision. However, I was delighted to see the other women in the audience were near riotous; they couldn’t believe this great guy was being unappreciated. It shaved a layer off of my cynical shell.
When the show finally ended, I was dying because we had been living on a diet of water and coffee for the last few hours and we weren’t given a “last call” for the bathroom either. Before we left, they gave us a book written by the genius that invented www.perfectmatch.com whose name is ironically Dr. Pepper. Yes, really.
We are told the show’s staff is sponsoring a lunch for us at Hollywood and Highland where the final matches would be revealed. We are led into a stark dining room without music or booze (which is a prerequisite for the blind dating process. That is why weddings are such a great place to meet someone single,available and, ahem, friendly). However, I have to admit the lunch catered by Wolfgang Puck’s was fantastic with a great selection of food. I only wish it hadn’t been served in a cafeteria setting because it made you feel like it was the first day of school.
After realizing everyone else was just as skeptical, I sat down at a table with attractive women and started gabbing away only to realize that a lot of people were pissed off with this experience. I guess I think sooner or later I will meet someone. I mean, most of my female friends can’t figure out why I haven’t had much luck with dating. Sure, this show taping wasn’t the best experience, but I got a free lunch and it was better than going to work.. Not too bad.
But some of these people really thought they were going to meet “the one” today. They had come from cities like Hemmet, Bakersfield and San Diego. There were a lot of single parents there, men and women who had to do a lot of coordinating, like hiring sitters, just to be free for the day; those are the ones who have it the toughest and I genuinely felt for them. I was hoping that either perfectmatch.com or Dr. Phil would do something nice for them. Perhaps put their pictures on their website the day of the show. Something. Anything.
There was an attractive older real estate agent (yeah, right “you’re 39” my ass) who was thrilled after a younger guy sat down with us, thinking he might ask her out. As for me, I met a gal with some potential, an actress from Glendale who seemed fun. We spent the rest of the afternoon together shopping for strange items at Hot Topic. A phone call or two later I realized that she was going through a difficult and crazy time in her life, one that is very similar to a difficult and crazy time I had a few years ago. It didn’t take long to realize she’s just “unavailable” right now. That’s too bad; when she let her guard down, she was really fun and interesting.
Without finding out who this specific person was, the day ended and it was time to leave. They told us they would do a follow up with an email telling us who they chose for us ... but that didn’t happen. Instead, we got an email from perfectmatch.com telling us what a success the day was - for them anyway. Apparently, a small percentage of people had flaked on showing up (after all, this is LA) which screwed up their ability to match more than 10 couples for the cameras. Also, according to the email, if we hadn’t found out who our match was, we would know soon ... That was a few weeks ago and I am still waiting.. I’ve emailed them a few times since, but still no response.
I am sure the perfectmatch.com people are very happy with their national exposure and PR scam. But let’s face it, although I don’t blame Dr. Phil, I’m sure he had that thing that the road to hell is paved with, oh yeah, good intentions. It’s a month later, I am still waiting.
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