Dispatches

By Ginia Bellafante, in Orlando, Florida

How many 9s do you pass when you start at 1 and count to 100? Eleven hundred men and women possessing a great facility for answering this and similar questions are spending a hot July weekend at Orlando's Peabody Hotel. They have come for the annual gathering of the Mensa society, a group that admits any applicant who has an intelligence-test score in the top 2% of the population; the question above is from a Mensa test, but SAT scores or any standard I.Q. test score will do. Mensa says it provides a "stimulating intellectual and social environment for its members." In fact there are dozens of special-interest groups, on everything from personal investing to Andrew Lloyd Webber. The original mission of Mensa, which was formed at Oxford University in 1946, was to "bring highly intelligent people together to help solve the world's problems." If this year's gathering is any indication, however, that purpose has evolved into something quite different: to bring highly intelligent people together to help them get dates. And to that end, Mensa has created here a sort of Stanford-Binet Club Med with plenty of Inglenook.

Barbara, a public-speaking instructor and professional psychic, does not dissemble about her reasons for joining a group that says it "encourages research into the nature, characteristics, and uses of intelligence." "Not being gorgeous or anything, I'm no man magnet," she says. "I joined Mensa to meet men." Happily, there are hundreds right here who aren't exactly woman magnets but who are very uninhibited about expressing their feelings. Indeed, I LOVE TO GIVE AND GET BACK RUBS and I NEED A HUG buttons are popular among Mensa males, and some of them are even more direct. "If you want to approach someone you don't know," advises an aerospace-industry worker, "you can just say, 'I want a hug.' "

A convention of people with super-high I.Q.s wouldn't be complete without classes and seminars. You can, for example, take Belly Dance for Fun and Fitness; An Intellectual's Guide to Good Sex; or Intelligent S&M for the '90s. There is art as well: My Life as an Erotic Artist is a slide display of works by Hutch, a pudgy Mensan software engineer. He is particularly proud of his penis-shaped ceramic incense burner.

Hutch is absent from one of the weekend's most stimulating events -- the Fishbowl, a parlor game in which a group of 28 men and 24 women assemble to ask one another sexually oriented questions. During the session, a fortyish woman wins applause with the sort of inspired reasoning one would expect here: "It's not the size of the wand," she announces in response to no question, "it's the magic in it!"

Maybe, just maybe, some of this year's Fishbowlers will be lucky enough to find the contentment that Janice and Stan now share. They met through Mensa and married. "I often had to hide my intelligence with men," says Janice, who is an employee-relations specialist and part-time clown. "With Stan, I can be myself."