On a balmy Friday night in downtown Kansas City, a mixture of single people, accompanying wingmen and curious spectators milled about recordBar. The atmosphere was palpably nervous — but with a trace of hope in the air, too.
“Bring back dating in person!” exclaimed Zoey Ramel, who has been single for the last two years. “Dating apps are like the worst invention on earth.”
Near the front door, a station with name tags and colored dots encouraged attendees to signal their availability. Green meant single. Yellow meant it’s complicated. Red meant you’re taken.
Annaliese Broce walked up to the table and picked red, although she was single and open to meeting someone.
“I don’t want to tell people they can flirt with me!” Broce said. “I just wanna, you know, people watch.”
Ramel, Broce and around 250 other people came out to participate in "That KC Dating Show," a new singles event in Kansas City that aims to get people coupled up through a live game show.
“ I think it can be really hard to meet people here,” said event host and producer Sarah O’Sullivan. “ It's a big, but small, city, where everybody knows everybody.”
O’Sullivan likes to compare the dating scene in Kansas City to the Missouri River: “It’s full of s---.”
Everyone thinks the dating scene in their city is the absolute worst. But in Kansas City, some cold hard data and empirical evidence backs it up.
Kansas City ranked in the lower 50% of U.S. cities for dating last year, according to personal finance company WalletHub, which analyzed more than 180 U.S. cities across “35 key indicators of dating-friendliness.”
All the more reason to replace swiping with something a bit more novel.
Back to 'The Dating Game'
"That KC Dating Show" takes inspiration from the first dating TV show ever broadcast in America, “The Dating Game,” which debuted 60 years ago this December.
The premise of “The Dating Game” was simple. On one side of the stage, a bachelor or bachelorette asked questions in front of a live studio audience. On the other side, hidden by a partition, sat their three potential dates.
Certain kinds of questions like name, age, occupation, and income weren’t allowed — the idea being that you focus less on surface-level stuff, and more on genuine connection to find your match.
"That KC Dating Show" pays homage to that classic format while giving it some modern updates. For example, no questions are off limits, it has categories geared towards queer people, and local stand-up comics kick off each round.
O’Sullivan says the latter especially gets people laughing, and helps them shake off any nerves. She’s usually joined on stage by fellow comics Cassie Duncan and J Petty.
But the two shows share the same fundamental mission.
“ Through this experience, I have definitely found a love for getting people hooked up,” O’Sullivan said.
‘Excited, nervous — all the feelings right now’
Titus Wong is a self-confessed introvert. After six months of being single, though, he volunteered to be one of the contestants for the September edition of That KC Dating Show.
“ It's tough out in Kansas City. Especially for myself, as an Asian male, I feel like I'm not the main demographic that's really wanted in this city,” Wong said. “But I can't expect to find a relationship being holed up at home.”
During his round, Wong was one of three male contestants questioned by an eligible bachelorette.
She started off by asking him, “You are a car. Convince me to take you on a test drive.”
Wong responded, “Smooth drive. Reliable. Low mileage.”
The crowd erupted with laughter.
“I was an absolute wreck as soon as I got up on that stage,” Wong said afterwards. “Heart dropped to my stomach. But you know what? We made it out alive, had a good time.”
Although the bachelorette eliminated Wong second that round, he got swarmed after getting offstage by people who wanted to chat.
“I got an Instagram of a girl,” he said. “We'll see where it goes from there.”
Isabella Neuberg didn’t win her category either, but she also got plenty of conversations afterwards.
“I met this guy, and he is a tax attorney,” said Neuberg, who is a plaintiff employment attorney. “I think that’s really cool, and we exchanged numbers.”
A match made in the audience?
You don’t have to subject yourself to vulnerable questions about your dating history in order to make the event worthwhile. After all, there are hundreds of other single people who aren't on stage.
Adam Sullens tried to attend the very first "That KC Dating Show" event in April, but it sold out. So next time, he bought a ticket in advance.
“ I came by myself, so I was, you know, awkward, of course,” Sullens recalled. “And I'm just kind of looking around.”
That’s when a woman across the room noticed him.
“ I thought, ‘Oh, there's that guy again,’” said Sarah Biegelsen, who remembered Sullens from the previous month as the adorable guy who got turned away at the door.
It was your classic meet-cute.
“I remember making eye contact with her from across the room,” Sullens said. “She was the first girl that I was like, ‘yeah.’ Like, I dig her already.”
“I lingered in a way, whereas I planned for him to speak to me,” Biegelsen said. “I knew what I was doing.”
Six months later, they’re still together.
If you’re having a lousy time meeting people in Kansas City, Biegelsen advises getting out in a different way.
“If you put yourself in the mindset that, ‘Oh, there's no one out there.’ Guess what? You're gonna find no one,” Biegelsen said. “ I don't believe that Kansas City is the worst place to date. I think every city says that about themselves. It’s really what you make of it.”
Prior to meeting Sullens, Biegelsen regularly went to bars by herself and brought a book. If she met someone, great. If she didn’t, she was that much closer to her book reading goal.
“There’s infinite possibilities,” she said. “It’s really just about being open.”
The next That KC Dating Show will be Dec. 12 at recordBar — and they’re accepting submissions for contestants until Nov. 30.
