It's Music
To Their Dears

By Eve Zibart

So you're single (Again.) You're intelligent, well educated and interested in a Significant Relationship, but the only type of bar you like has a treble clef and time signature. You're new in town and just bought season tickets to the symphony, but you don't like those dating services that turn your phone number over to every nerd who pays the fee. And you can't even read those alphabet soup classifieds.

Well, roll over Beethoven, and tell Tchaikovsky the news. You can make beautiful music with your rockabye Brahms baby - just join the nationwide Classical Music Lovers' Exchange, a matchmaking service hooked to harmonious interests…

For $65 you get a six-month subscription and mini-bios of all CMLE members in 25 words or less. Then, if any strike your fancy, you send in $2 for a full-page profile.

the exchange has had about 8,000 members since its inception in November 1980 and scores of what the monthly newsletters call "mission accomplished." Just ask Tony Ellison … and Shana Millstein …, who got one another's CMLE numbers a year ago.

Her profile said she was a psychologist, living in San Francisco but relocating to Washington, who enjoyed choral music, photography and cooking. She was divorced and looking. (She trimmed her weight just a little.)

His listing described a lawyer who liked baseball, "things Italian" - and photography and cooking. He was divorced and looking. (He plumped up his weight just a little.)

He was her 19^th dossier and her third date in nine months membership. He'd had dates with 60 or 70 CMLE women, and a short-lived marriage, over a six-year period. She wrote to him and misspelled his name. He called her up and mispronounced hers.

They made a date for the Kennedy Center, meeting at a bar on Washington Circle… Pincas Zukerman was fine, but it was when they walked to their cars that they began to discover how like their musical tastes really were….

They quickly discovered more similarities (they're both outgoing and almost obsessively organized; they both document events with photos and scrapbooks, like sushi, etc.). And in August, at a friend's wedding, they began comparing notes on what kind of ceremony they wanted - "and before you know it we had pulled out our day books and set the date" for July 8.

"It really happened - I met the woman of my dreams" Ellison wrote [CMLE]. "You have our eternal gratitude.

"We're so happy, we're boring," Millstein says.

Millstein says the advantages of CMLE are that you get to choose your contacts, "and they're people you know something about and have things in common with."

"I've always hated blind dates," she says, "and even those singles parties where you go because you're single. It's like a meat market." ….