She used to work for Ms., she tells me, but now she is unemployed. She wants to know who I write for, and what editors I know. By the time we are swapping gossip about the recent shifts of editors in chief at Ms., I become deeply depressed. Why spend an hour and a half in the dark replicating the conversations I have over IM each day with the rest of my unemployed magazine friends?

So when I recognize the green glowing eyes of a passing waiter over my shoulder, I grab him. "Hey," I say. "I'm a journalist. Can I borrow your goggles?"

The waiter suddenly becomes very offended. "What, you don't recognize me?" I start to point out that, in fact, I can't see my own hand in front of my face. But the waiter stops me. "Amy! It's me!"

It turns out one of the many rules of journalism is that amateurs do it best. That "waiter" happens to be Jason, who, in an effort to help me with my story, has figured out how to finagle goggles out of the waiters. (He decided against beating up Cellphone Boy when he discovered it was Cellphone Girl.) He leads me back to the corner where a blind waiter is passing dishes in the dark. And the waiter agrees that yes, in the interest of journalistic accuracy, I can take my turn as the sighted among the (hopefully) naked.

Finally, I will see what scandals are passing before my blind eyes. I'm hoping for sex, nudity, strange uses of condiments. Surely not everyone in the room is patiently picking at their tuna tartare and talking about what they read in the Times Arts & Leisure section over the weekend.

I put the goggles on. (They are surprisingly, dangerously heavy.) Everything is green. And everyone is seated. In my five minutes of omniscience, I see few things that would be out of the ordinary in any dining establishment (save the obvious disregard for utensils). There are a few arms resting on neighbors, a few kisses here and there. The most scandalous display appears to be taking place on an elevated platform to the left of the tables where a couple is kind of sort of making out, but even that wouldn't raise eyebrows in the light.

After strategically using my gift of sight to locate the stray bottles of wine, I return to my seat, goggleless, only to accidentally steal the wine glass of the person sitting to my left. When he begins to complain loudly, I make a desperate, ultimately futile search for the bottle I know I put right here, there, somewhere. It's hopeless. I go back to eating my sticky-sweet salmon, flake by flake, and licking my fingers.

And then comes the parade of candles. As the evening winds down, the waiters dash in to illuminate our activities. They encourage us to look around. The good-looking couple across from us looks like a parody of a Manhattan couple in their early 30s: He's blond and wearing a blue Oxford cloth shirt; she has dark shoulder-length hair and is wearing a black cocktail dress. But the boy sitting to my left turns out to be the most attractive one in the room (besides the French organizers, of course). and I've stolen his wine. He's spent the entire dinner with his head in his girlfriend's lap, or so he tells us (without explaining what exactly he was doing there).

Over after-dinner (outdoor) cigarettes, there is a definite swingers vibe all around. One couple asks us what we are doing later that night. ("Visiting Jason's girlfriend," we say.) The attractive boy and his girlfriend invite us to go samba dancing with them sometime.

Then Jason shows me up once again by bribing the waiters to meet us at the restaurant where his girlfriend works, promising them bottles of wine. We are hoping that they have seen things we have not, that they will tell us tales of debauchery with food and sex. Alas, there is none of that. They admit that this was one of the tamer evenings (Cosmo Party has hosted 10 Dinner in the Dark events since December 2002, and two are planned for early June.) There was a food fight at the last Dinner in the Dark. There are usually many back rubs and some groping. But nothing too scandalous. They, too, saw the couple making out on the stage. And that turns out to be the most shocking revelation of the evening.

It turns out the make-out couple was part of the Israeli camera crew.

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