Save the Date(ing)

     The writer met Hattie Elliot, the founder of Save the Date(ing), on a stinging cold January morning at Snice, a little coffee shop on 8th Avenue and West 4th Street, a couple of blocks from the E train’s 14th street stop. This is the part of the city where things get wonky: 14th Street, 13th Street, gas station, traffic island, West 4th Street. The writer’s late and flustered but Elliot’s completely jazzed about Save the Date(ing), which she founded as a fun and nonstressful way for singles to meet. On the other hand, the nonstressful part is conditional. The stress, for the busy folks that sign up for the program, is the pleasurable kind.

     Elliot started the business in November 2008 as a hobby, to enable her friends to meet each other. She believes the best way to meet someone is “the way our parents did, through a friend or the church,” so she got fifteen of her girlfriends and fifteen of her guy friends together.  Though she does see the value of networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and match.com, she believes it’s still valuable to meet face to face.  Now Save the Date(ing) has 200 members and Elliot recruits 15-20 new members a month. At least a couple of them have gotten engaged through Save the Date(ing). “We’re on a mission to revive the idea of old fashioned courtship,” Elliot says.

     She just opened a new chapter in San Francisco, to join the ones in New York and Los Angeles. “So if you are in one club you can network with another,” she explains. She hopes to open chapters in San Diego and Chicago soon. The dues are $250 per quarter.

     Activities at the monthly meetings include sushi making, flying trapeze lessons (which was fun but left people a bit bruised), classic cocktail making taught by a mixologist, cigar rolling and whisky tasting. Elliot’s rented a ski house in Killington, Vermont for the first week of March, and the twenty lucky guests will have the services of a chef. Then Elliot mentioned another activity that took the writer by surprise.

     “Did you say hooker night?” I asked.

     “No poker night,” Elliot corrected.

     The members don’t have that kind of fun.

     There will also be snowmobiling, tequila and food preparing, a bocce ball tournament in L.A. and splatter painting a la Jackson Pollack. Elliot usually participates but she draws the line at skydiving. “I value my life much too much,” she says, though her partner might partake, having skydived before. She has a two full time Save the Date(ing) workers in New York, one in Los Angeles, and will have one worker each in San Francisco, San Diego and Chicago. Not surprisingly, she flies about three times a month and has a seventeen hour work day, but she loves it.

     The ambitious, smart and meticulous Elliot, who spent at least some of her recent vacation in Guatemala sussing out places to hold events, describes herself as a woman who’s used to going on “twenty-first dates.” She vets every person who applies for Save the Date(ing). Not surprisingly the clients are largely go getters like herself. One, who’s involved in the charity Doctors Without Borders, made a film about them and is having a private screening. Another member is involved with Harboring Hearts, which extends hospitality to patients who come to New York for heart surgery.  “If members have charities or projects, we'll help promote it through the network,” says Elliot.

     Like Elliot, who has an apartment not far from her coffee shop, most of the clientele are from downtown, and Save the Date(ing) has its base in the Village. “It’s a very downtown organization,” she says.

Read Arlene's Theatre Reviews