Anyone remember the Groucho Marx joke about never joining a club that would have him as a member?
Mensa holding a convention in Las Vegas seems like the setup for a joke. The cerebral society gathering here means, according to its press release, that "a quarter million IQ points will descend on Las Vegas."
That explains all the people playing Scrabble.
Actually, IQ testing is just one of the 200 or so qualifying criteria Mensa accepts. In fact, many of the tests that can make you a member don't ostensibly have much to do with measuring intelligence, like LSAT, a law-school admissions exam. This allows Mensa to circumvent the thorny racial and sociological controversies of IQ testing while still sticking to their own kind: It may not measure your brain, but there aren't any morons acing the LSAT.
If all else fails, Mensa has its own membership quiz. "We don't use terms like pass or fail," Catherine Barney, Mensa's public-relations manager, says during last weekend's gathering at the Paris Las Vegas. "We say that results qualify or not." I wonder if she thinks that if I don't qualify, I'll be too dumb to know that I failed. Or maybe I figured it out because my almost two-decade-old SAT scores show I could "qualify" as a member.
A sample question from the Mensa quiz:
Question 1: What number, plus 13, is equal to 1/4 of 116?
I could figure it out, but that would hurt my head, and my head already hurts from several days of wondering who would want to hang out with people who find this question worth answering as a prerequisite to social interaction.
As I'm leaving for the convention, a neighbor who's a stripper asks if she can come along. She thinks the place will be packed with rich people. But intelligence does not necessarily mean achievement or success, and the conventioneers at Paris do not seem like the ruling elite. Actually, more than an intellectual society or networking service for the powerful, the Annual Gathering (members call it simply AG) seems, at first blush, more like a dating service for the socially awkward. Frumpy is in. Members wear ID badges that have names as well as colored dots: A green dot means you can walk right up and give a stranger a hug, a yellow means ask first, and the red dot means don't touch. In addition, single members wear a blue dot. There are a lot of blue dots.
One good thing about Mensa is that the members are unabashed in their geekiness. No one even pretends to be cool. "It's great to be around a bunch of dorks like me," a woman says. I wonder if she means me, and decide she probably does. The horror, the horror! I blend in perfectly here.
Thursday's Gen X scavenger hunt, too, offers getting-to-know-you games, albeit with an intellectual bent. Each member, for example, has to create a six-letter word from the first letter of different first names in the room. As they will all weekend, people keep assuming I am a member despite my tag that says MEDIA in big letters. I explain to one man, a bit testily, that I am not a member and point to my tag. He looks down at the rules for the hunt, and then at me. "The instructions say 'person,' not 'member'," he says.
Smart ass.
That afternoon, during a Mensa-sponsored speed-dating session—in which people switch partners every three minutes—I'm sitting off to the side, but people keep joining me as if I am member. One woman, when she learns the truth, says, "I'm only interested in intelligent men" and leaves. Diana, an airport screener from Phoenix, stops by my table briefly and decides to talk even after I tell her I am not in Mensa. I ask her about her work.
"You never know when you open a package if it is going to be the last thing you see. I love these conventions because my life is so stressful and this is a huge release."
Friday night's '80s Dance Night and costume contest looks far too much like a high-school dance. Geniuses seem to enjoy the same crappy music from the '80s that everyone else did. I should have known. Yet, like my neighbor dreaming of rich guys, I was for some reason expecting the smart set to yearn for Husker Du instead of run to the dance floor—like they do—to Wang Chung. Mostly, though, people sit around the boxy convention room not talking to each other. A few have brought books. I can't tell if some people are dressed in costumes for the contest or just look like that. If this was high school, I would, for the first time, be the coolest one there. That can't be the case. So, when I see Diana, I ask her if she thinks the dance is, well, a bit lame.
"Yes, that's because the fun is next door. There is an open bar there, and they are charging for the drinks here. We're smart people, so we figured it out." She leaves to go next door and I follow.
Next door, it turns out, contains not only an open bar but a snack table, where many people are congregated. Though it is Friday night in Las Vegas, one table has seven players intensely working on a game of dominoes.
In fact, for many of the conventioneers here, the experience of the wild side of Vegas was limited to the panels. A local journalist came to speak about entertainment, a brothel madam talked to the group, too, and a series of speakers lectured on gambling. "We have the AG in a different city every year so that we can study it and the panels are designed around that. Next year it will be New Orleans," a man who doesn't want his name used tells me.
Actually, having covered a lot of conventions, this seems like a pretty good twist on things. I came expecting the panels to deal with the latest research into intelligence, brain chemistry and other mind-numbing topics for the cerebrally obessesed. It might even be fun to explore New Orleans with people filled with such wide-ranging curiosity and interests. Of course, I would get out on the town a bit more than most of these folks.
On the way out, a lady I don't recognize hugs me—even though there is no green dot on my tag—and says, "See you next year." I can't help wondering why this never happened when I covered the Adult Video Network convention.