The New 90-Year-Old Face of Internet Dating

Life in the Boomer Lane firmly believes that there are two things that never age out, no matter how old we are. One is the dislike of going to the dentist.  The other is the hunt for love.

JDate, the largest internet dating company aimed at Jewish singles, has, like other online singles websites, gone through presenting the usual array of photos of hot young men and women, in order to attract potential customers. Singles believe that they, no matter what they look like, will find someone just like the models pictured on the ads. By the time they realize they have been duped, they are already in love with someone who is in roughly the same category of attractiveness they are.

In reality, the singles pictured are actually professional models, manufactured in a big factory that spits them out, with permanent smiles on their faces that showcase their perfectly white, blinding smiles.  Should a human actually touch any one of them, they would vaporize and leave a disturbing chemical smell in their wake.

Not satisfied with merely continuing to showcase the same fake singles they always have been, JDate has made a switch. The result: They found Bea Slater. Slater is sexy, smart, funny as hell. She is also 90-years-old. JDate grabbed her (not literally, but LBL is certain that the JDate guys thought about it).

Hot as she may be, JDate didn’t grab Slater in order to showcase her to potential suitors. Instead, she and a couple other 90-year-olds are part of JDate’s new “Powered by Yentas” advertising campaign. For those readers who aren’t familiar with the word yenta, LBL will illuminate: The negative definition of a yenta is a woman who is a gossip or busybody.  But JDate prefers to see the yenta as the older woman who is constantly scouting out mates for the single men and women around her.

The message here is that Slater, and her cohorts are the modern version of the age-old tradition among many cultures of the older generations finding mates for the younger.

“Jewish grandmas have been setting up young, eligible Jews for centuries, if not longer. We wanted to show, in a visually funny and arresting way, that yentas were the brains behind JDate’s matches,” said copywriter and stand-up comedian David Roth, who created the campaign along with a company call Hogarth Worldwide. “We juxtaposed the old world of Jewish grandmas with the new world of tech and Silicon Valley.”

Taglines on the ads include “She knows JavaScript, Python and Shirley Finkelstein’s grandson,” or “Kvetch all day. Code all night.”

Slater’s posters boast “Her dreidel game is filthy, but her code is clean.”

(For those Readers who are unable to see the humor in any of the taglines listed, LBL is in your court. Although she was raised Jewish, she is not a fan of whatever kind of humor that is. She only knows that beside not being funny, it always smells vaguely like gefilte fish. )

Slater, along with the other would-be poster babes, had to audition. LBL attempted to obtain a video of that audition in order to educate and entertain loyal readers, but she failed. She will leave it to readers’ imagination what went on in that room.

The bottom line here is that LBL is not only thrilled that 90-year-old women can be the face of internet dating, she is also convinced that there will be a bonus these women never dreamed of:  Mark her words. Men all over the country will clamor for dates with them. Stay tuned.  In the meantime, you can all start looking at your very elderly female family members and imaging them as real money-making opportunities for you.

Slater, herself, sure to have advertisers and suitors clamoring at her door, is currently more focused on her next goal: jumping out of an airplane.