If your cardboard and paper-lace valentines box wasn’t exactly overflowing on the big day, don’t despair. There are plenty of potential sweethearts posting regularly to the Minneapolis Craigslist “Missed Connections” page. Functioning as an online “I Saw You,” this forum gives shy-types a chance to yearn in public, or sort of in public, whether mentioning a suggestive cough on the 4A or searching for a lost love from ten years earlier. As workers at the Wedge Community Co-op recently learned, the page can produce plenty of real-life drama.
The tempest began in late October, with a wistful entry titled, the fishmonger – with personality. “Oh seafood counter fellow…how you make my visit to the co-op so much more than just grocery shopping. Your preparation suggestions improve my dinner, your clever banter makes me smile, and your eyes are rather lovely (nice glasses too!). I think I’d like to make fish with you and exchange further witticisms.” Over the next three weeks, Wedge regulars, ex-patrons, employees, and even members of other co-ops visited the page and dished their opinions and various crushes.
Inside 2105 Lyndale Avenue South, it took only a couple of days for word of the seafood post to spread. Brent and Kyle, both bantering fishmongers with nice glasses, emerged as the most likely objects of desire. Kyle composed a response on behalf of his celebrated department: “Everyone has been drawn to this like sharks to blood,” he wrote. “Of us all that work within the Meat & Seafood Dept. only 3 Do NOT wear glasses. How are we to know of whom you speak???” The confusion finally cleared when Brent read the post, recognized some its more specific references, and wrote a private email to his admirer. (Kyle was singled out several entries later: “Bravo—you’re a real cutey and damn good at your job.”)
Grocery stores have always made good venues for flirtation, for making eyes while hefting an especially juicy grapefruit or squeezing a fresh loaf of bread. And with Brent and Kyle, especially, interactions often get mighty chatty. Brent’s repertoire includes jokes, cooking advice, and questions like, “What’s Keanu Reeves’ worst movie?”; “What famous person died of Lou Gehrig’s Disease?”; and, when standing next to a fellow co-worker, “Who’s cuter?”
Usually, the conversation ends right there. So Brent was both surprised and abashed by the Craigslist post. “I was so flattered!” he said. “My whole life, even as a young teen, I was looking in the ‘I Saw You’ … I’d always thumb through those and be like, ‘Why can’t someone just see me?’”
The post, which turned out to have been penned by a woman named Marie, led to almost forty additional entries over the following weeks, and an entirely new blog (isawyouatthewedge.blogspot.com). Most posts were affectionate. One told a cashier, “You’re feisty and hilarious.” Another marveled, “… every time I go in, I see beautiful people touching my foodstuffs.” Not to miss out on the action, a Seward Co-op Grocery & Deli regular commented that the Wedge is “not the only co-op full of foxy folk. Seward got hotties at the help desk, cashiers, stocking shelves, produce, HBC and deli!”
Since November, the Wedge fishmonger discussion has mostly died down, though the co-op still comes up now and again, as in one recent entry titled, the wedge, tuesdays normally, where someone wrote of a grocery bagger, “i used to think you were flirting with me with your all too familiar greeting. now i see you just are that way and that’s pretty great.” And those curious to read the posts from the original saga likely will come up empty-handed. The Craigslist archives only reach back roughly eight hundred posts, or less than two months.
But don’t despair. The “Missed Connections” page abounds with earnest, heartfelt, aw-shucks declarations of love or lust focused almost exclusively on Twin Cities residents. Skeptics may argue that online romance discussions are bogus—in theory, one person could pop a few multivitamins, log on, and go to town, strictly for entertainment. But there’s no disputing that Brent found a new, very real, pal. Of Marie, he says, “She’s cool. I like hanging out with her a lot.”
—Eden Benbow