Ryan Snook
YOU SAY YOU WANT TO MEET SOMEONE funny, smart, and sweet; you want a lover who's good with words. I'll tell you right now: You can leave the bar scene behind. Come with me instead to the Seattle Scrabble Club (SSC), which meets every Tuesday at 6:15 p.m. at FareStart Restaurant (1902 Second Ave., 206-285-7188). Here, the hyperarticulate?or at least the very good spellers?can hook up according to their own orthographic rules.
Just ask Christina O'Sullivan. She met her husband, Tobin Lathrop, in an online Scrabble forum nearly 12 years ago; today they live in Seattle with their "Scrabble spawn," 2-year-old Chas. It seems an affinity for word games can bridge even the widest gaps, since O'Sullivan was a student in Vancouver, B.C., when she first encountered Lathrop, who lived in St. Louis. "[Tobin] and I met . . . on these online hangouts, or multiuser domains," O'Sullivan explains. "He and I used to play these very long Scrabble games . . . it was just a way to occupy ourselves and talk." Things really began to heat up, she says, when Lathrop "bought the hardcover copy of the second edition of The Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary, and he started playing these obscure two- and three-letter words against me, and I felt I had to keep up."
Offline, the two have been SSC members since the mid-'90s. O'Sullivan maintains that the SSC includes many "young singles" among its members. On a recent Tuesday night, however, I found a coterie of senior citizens, married thirtysomething folk, and the occasional single-looking man, with no eligible women in sight. Daniel, a particularly avid player with glasses and a build like a string bean, strolled from table to table after each round, studying other players' gambits and word choices intently. He experienced his greatest moment of the night as a word judge in round three. When a skeptical player cried, "Challenge!" Daniel stopped, turned sharply like a trained Scrabble athlete, and stormed over to the table in question. To a hard-core word freak, Daniel must have D-R-E-A-M-B-O-A-T written all over him, although the term is only valid in British play.
Notwithstanding the shortage of available singles in the room that night (like that extra "H" you so desperately need to spell "chthonic" for 87 points), the O'Sullivan-Lathrop clan is proof that Scrabble can lead to relationships. But if the SSC is a hit-or-miss prospect for logophiles, where else should a hot-to-trot Scrabble fan look for love? O'Sullivan recommends the group that meets at 3 p.m. every Sunday at Third Place Commons (17171 Bothell Way N.E.); she also cites the Scrabble Meetup at the Elysian Brewing Co. (1221 E. Pike St.), which takes place at 8 p.m. on the second Wednesday of every month (visit www.scrabble.meetup.com/ to register). It's Seattle's premier Scrabble mixer, O'Sullivan reports: "Lots of single people there."
But if you go looking for a mate at the Meetup, please avoid using lines like "Nice rack!" and "Did you know they changed the alphabet? They put U and I together." So how do you charm an experienced Scrabbler? Pull out an anagram puzzle, advises O'Sullivan, and watch your crush's mind whir into action. NEOTERIC and ISOMETRIC always seem to break the ice.
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