Members of the Tribe (30 page)

To get in touch with another Meeter, you simply write a note addressed to his or her number and turn it in at the message center in the lobby, where it is filed. During the weekend people stop by every hour or so to check their mail.

The instructions for placing the ad advise not to worry about cleverness, which is like telling Ronald Reagan not to worry about Communism. The singles, especially the veterans, know that the
Digest
is their one shot at reaching a mass audience, and many of them had worked on their entries for weeks in advance. Those who hadn’t sat in the lobby chewing pencils in nervous concentration, or stared helplessly into space in search of inspiration.

Mike Hall invited me to fill out an ad, and I felt a twinge of competitive pressure. I was supposed to be a writer, after all, and I didn’t want to be outdone by a bunch of amateurs. But when the
Digest
came out the next morning, I saw that I was out of my league—many of the ads would have done credit to a Madison
Avenue copywriter. In my own ad I settled for the truth—“Israeli author looking for information”—a formulation that made me feel virtuously above the fray. In the course of the weekend, however, I learned that “author looking for information” is one of the most shopworn ploys in the catalog of come-ons.

Once the ad was placed, I went to the dining room for an instantaneous feeding. As a guest of the hotel I was seated at a specially reserved table with Mike Hall, a lugubrious widower named Joe who covers the nightclub scene for
Variety
, and a couple of fellow deadheads.

My host, Hall, is a Broadway publicist with nightspots, starlets, popular authors, and fancy restaurants for clients. Hall’s is an anachronistic calling, but then the Concord is an anachronistic place. For all its computerized digests and nonsectarian pretensions, the aura of Marjorie Morningstar lies over the hotel like a latke on an empty stomach. Many of the singles began coming to the mountains, to this very resort, as children on family holidays; a number of their own parents met each other at the Concord. To these singles, residents of the great Jewish middle class of the outer boroughs, this is home, familiar turf, their place in the country.

Hall introduced me to Jimmy the Celebrity Waiter, who instantaneously produced matzoh ball soup, gefilte fish, chopped liver, and other deli items. The meal was a shock. The Concord is justly famous for the quantity of its food, but the quality reminded me of holiday dinners in the Israeli army—kosher, bland, and overcooked.

No one seemed to mind the food, though. Throughout the gigantic room, people sat at round tables of eight or ten and tried to eat while looking over each others’ shoulders. This kind of rubbernecking is the standard Singles’ Weekend posture, used in all conversations and other activities. The unofficial motto of the weekend is “Keep looking, there’s always somebody better.”

Almost no one is brave enough to come to Singles’ Weekend alone. People arrive in pairs or threesomes and at Friday dinner they were still together. They talked among themselves but never stopped scouting the other tables, occasionally nudging one another to point out an interesting prospect.

After dinner, the real action began. Eighteen hundred singles rose en masse and began to surge up and down the long indoor
promenade that connects the dining room to the lobby. Some sat on the gray sofas that were arranged, living room style, on either side of the walkway. Young men dressed in expensive sportswear sauntered back and forth in boisterous groups, bottles of Budweiser in hand. The women, quieter but no less intent, cruised the corridor displaying the peripheral vision of NBA guards. It was still early, and people traveled in pairs or groups for protection, but here and there you could already spot couples coming together. Singles’ Weekend was now officially under way, a college mixer held in a suburban shopping mall.

People who attend these events have a losers’ image, but the singles in the promenade seemed perfectly normal, even attractive. Most of the women were between twenty and thirty, although quite a few were close to forty, and a handful were in their fifties. The median age of the men was a few years older. Both the men and women appeared to be in very good shape; many had been dieting and working out for months to prepare for the weekend.

A few months earlier, in Detroit, I had found out how important physical conditioning is on the Jewish singles circuit. While I was in town a controversy erupted when a disgruntled young woman wrote to a local paper complaining that she had been turned down by Lo-la, a private Jewish dating service, because she was too fat. She claimed to be a victim of weight discrimination and scorned the service’s proprietors—two Detroit grandmothers named Millie Rosenbaum and Claire Arm—for caring more about pounds and ounces than personality and character.

Millie Rosenbaum, a kindly woman, was plainly distressed by the affair and eager to explain the realities of the Jewish singles scene. She told me that most of her customers were under thirty. The agency accepts only Jews (using the traditional rabbinical criteria to determine eligibility); and most of them are assimilated, Reform, or Conservative types.

“They want partners who are culturally compatible,” Rosenbaum explained. “About half are willing to date people who keep kosher, but no one asks for it. Jewish values don’t mean much to them—mostly they’re just American yuppies, with a little Jewishness thrown in.

“As far as that overweight girl is concerned, I really feel for her. She’s right. Personality, character, those things
should
be
important. But today, the big thing—for both men and women—is physical fitness. They say, ‘I take care of my body, I want someone who takes care of his.’ That’s the attitude. The women want a professional, someone who can make a good living. Sometimes the men say they want a smart woman. But believe me, slender is the first requirement.

“I was in Chicago not too long ago,” she continued. “I stopped in at the Jewish dating bureau there, just to compare notes. I got to talking with the woman who runs it and I said, ‘I want to mention just one word to you, to see your reaction. And that word is ‘overweight.’ And the woman looked me right in the eye and said, ‘
Overweight?
I can answer that with just one word: Impossible!’ ”

The emphasis on good looks and good health is a national phenomenon, from the fathers of North Dallas who don’t want ugly daughters to the synagogue in L.A. that conducts aerobic Hebrew school classes, and the the crowd at the Concord reflected this preoccupation with fitness. Among the swirling throng it was hard to focus on individuals, but the overall impression was of attractive, robust people. On the other hand, I was surprised to find a large number of smokers. At first I attributed this to the pressure of the weekend, but later I realized that it was a class thing. The singles at the Concord dressed and talked like yuppies, but many were slightly downscale—legal secretaries and social workers, high school teachers and middle-level bureaucrats, optometrists and small-time CPAs. They were night-school graduates or the alumnae of subway colleges. The men sported last year’s Zapata mustaches, the women wore too much makeup and had overbites uncorrected by orthodontia.

As I walked along the promenade I was stopped by three swarthy young men, brothers from Brooklyn. “Hey,” one of them called to me. “What are you, some kind of professor?” The other two laughed loudly. I could see their point. In a corduroy jacket and jeans, and wearing a beard, I did have a kind of sixties look that seemed incongruous among these people who were dressed sharp as a tack. There was an edge to the question, too, an aggressive challenge I recognized from Israel but hadn’t heard from American Jews.

“Aleppo, right?” I guessed, and they looked at me like I was a magician. Actually, it was an easy call. My Israeli eye told me they were Syrian Jews, my American ear that they were from Brooklyn; and Brooklyn is full of Jews from Aleppo. I explained to them that I was from Jerusalem, and was working on a book about Jews in America. “Maybe I’ll write about you guys,” I said lightly. “We can talk about the Jewish singles scene.”

The brothers didn’t care for the idea at all, and they huddled closer together as if I had threatened them. “Forget it, we came up here to relax, y’know,” said one. He had a half-open shirt that revealed a large Jewish Star and a hairy chest. “We don’t have to come all the way to the mountains to get laid, y’understand?” The others nodded emphatically, three cool cats from Brooklyn—Huey, Dewey, and Louie at the Concord. “Go find yourself somebody else, professor, we ain’t washing our dirty linens in public.”

It was cabaret time, and the crowd began to file into the World’s Largest Nightclub for a free show, which consisted of a black singer who did Tom Jones imitations and a stand-up comic named Jackie Eagle. His routine leaned heavily on ethnic jokes (“Anyone here from Brooklyn?” Loud cheers. “Brooklyn, home of the Chasidim. Thirteenth Avenue is called the Rue da la Payes”) and anti-Arab material (“Ever notice that the Jews eat prunes? Sure we do. Now, the Arabs, they don’t eat any prunes. That’s why they’re full of shit.”)

The crowd laughed at the jokes and sang along with the Tom Jones imitator but their minds were elsewhere. The Concord’s PR kit claims that the resort “is to popular entertainment what LaStrada [sic] is to opera,” but Singles’ Weekend isn’t prime time. The hotel assumes that the crowd is more interested in socializing than being entertained, and the acts it books for the singles are mostly “middle-of-the-week” quality.

After the show, the younger women went upstairs and came down wearing dancing outfits—loose-fitting tops over black tights—and joined the younger men in the disco. Next door the thirties crowd gathered in the lounge, which looks like a Manhattan singles bar, and danced to a Motown-style band. Other nightclubs featured a jazz combo that played pre-Elvis fox-trots, a magician-comedian, and a lady who sang Gershwin tunes and accompanied herself on a baby grand.

I stood alone in the foyer trying to decide where to go first when a woman came up and introduced herself. Her name was Carol and, in a manner that was direct and friendly, she invited me to join her for a drink. Often it is the women who make the first move at these events; the men, for all their macho pose, seem shy, even a bit frightened. Carol, who told me she was a clinical psychologist from Long Island, explained the dynamics of the Singles’ Weekend.

“People come here expecting a big sex scene,” she said. “A lot of guys are afraid of sexual encounters and so they freeze. But once you’ve been up here a couple of times you realize that there is very little sex. For one thing, people live two or three in a room, and it’s not convenient. But mainly, sex is a waste of time. People come to meet other people, to build up a social life back in the city. If you pair off with one person and it doesn’t pan out, where are you?”

Put another way, sex at a Singles’ Weekend is not cost effective. It involves some preliminary work and perhaps a commitment for the rest of the weekend—and what if somebody better turns up? The system is to keep moving, keep circulating, keep getting names and numbers for real life. If the Concord is a kosher meat market, it is a wholesale one.

Of course, Singles’ Weekends are not celibate; sex has been known to take place on the premises. With the AIDS scare, Carol admitted that she had brought condoms, just in case. “I can’t believe I did it,” she said, laughing. “I mean, the other day I called a girlfriend and asked her how to ask for them in a drugstore. What are you supposed to say, like, ‘Gimme a dozen rubbers,’ or what? It’s such a high school thing, but what choice do you have? Listen, some people are really freaked—I met a woman up here with a doctor’s certificate, and she won’t even dance with anybody who doesn’t have one too. Now that’s sick. I mean, who brings a health certificate to the mountains?”

Carol got up to mingle as the band whanged its way into a Junior Walker medley. She was unembarrassed about the defection. “I’ll see you around,” she promised, “but I want to try to meet as many men as possible tonight. It’s good to start weeding them out early.”

I went to another table and introduced myself to a very pretty
tax lawyer in her early twenties and a young man who told me in simple Hebrew that he teaches special education. The lawyer had curly brown hair and dark almond eyes, and the teacher was obviously taken by her. They had known each other only a couple hours, but they allowed me to interrupt their budding courtship and talked candidly, almost clinically, about their hopes for the weekend and beyond.

“I live on Long Island,” the man said. “I have a nice house, a nice car. But I’m lonely. You have no idea how desolate Long Island can be in the winter. I’ve never been to one of these weekends before, but I want to find someone, a nice Jewish girl, and this is the place.” He looked fondly at the lawyer, and she smiled.

“I’ve been up here five times,” she said. “I moved to New York after law school, and I don’t have many friends in the city. This is like a whole separate social life up here. I’m not hung up on finding a Jewish man—I want to find the right man, and he could be anything. But the truth is, I’m more comfortable with Jewish guys. It’s just that a lot of them are very spoiled. But I’m ready for a family, and I’d like to have a Jewish family. I’d just feel more comfortable, that’s all.”

It wasn’t hard to figure out that they were speaking mostly for each other’s benefit, bouncing courtship signals off me like a communications satellite. I made a mental note to look them up again on Sunday, wished them luck, and headed back to the promenade.

There is an intentional sense of timelessness at the Concord; things stay open all night and there are no clocks. By two in the morning, the urinals in the men’s rooms were clogged with Budweiser cans and some of the dancers were panting for breath, but hundreds of people still surged up and down the halls. The more impatient ones were already a bit wild-eyed, working up the courage to take direct action but uncertain about what to do.

I decided to call it a night and headed for the elevator. On the way I saw a lurching, almost menacing approach by a man who passed a woman, turned, stared at her for a moment, and then yelled, “Hey.” She spun around, five or six paces beyond him, and waited. “What’s your name?” he called in an aggrieved voice, as if she had just smashed into his car.