It’s Monday night; football and Murphy Brown are on. Yet 15 people–7 women, 8 men–are downtown learning how to flirt. A lawyer, a musician, a computer programmer, and a mother and her son are among those who want to learn.
Brown’s learning-to-flirt class does not include batting the eyes, flicking the hair, or coming up with good one-liners. “That’s superficial,” she says. “There’s no such thing as a perfect line.” Anyone who wants to learn glibness, who wants to develop good openings, is wasting three hours and $65 with Brown.
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Instead she teaches her students to recognize and make the most of nonverbal cues. Then they learn to execute an all-important three-step sequence to start and maintain electrifying conversations.
“Oh, are those any good?” asks the male student, who may be at the produce counter or in the canned-food section–the other students aren’t sure which. “I never buy them because they’re too expensive.”
Another person, a young, good-looking urban professional male, expresses reservations about using the bus as a common ground. Because of the silence. “If you [do the formula] on the bus,” he says, “even if everything is going right, everyone else will hear it and it could be embarrassing.”
Raymond, an economist, has taken other classes with Brown and likes the idea of Flirting II. He says he pursues his goals to the “utmost extent,” and feels the class tonight will help him with his goal of meeting people. Loren, who formerly worked in commodities, says it will help him “gain exposure to different people, regain friendships, and expand contacts.” Tony the lawyer says it will help him break the ice so he can meet more people.
