At Long Last Love, But Not Here

The other day it occurred to me to wonder: Whatever happened to John and Julie Wingo?

The Wingos, a husband and wife team, burst onto the Puget Sound scene in January 1991. They appeared in full-page ads advertising J. Wingo International, an executive matchmaking service.

They opened offices in Bellevue. The standard fee for matchmaking was $5,000 and up. Special searches (if you were looking for a software millionaire) could cost $100,000. But, as John Wingo said at the time, "It's worth it if it leads to happiness."

After the interview, I forgot the Wingos. Then last week a book titled "At Long Last Love" arrived in the mail. The authors: John and Julie Wingo. A cover letter lists J. Wingo offices in five California cities, but none in Washington.

Whatever happened to love in a colder climate? John Wingo, speaking from his San Francisco office, provides the answer. He says, "We closed the Bellevue office. I was spending too much time traveling. Now clients come to San Francisco, or we work by phone. We still have clients up there, 10 or 12 a month.

"At the moment we're working with two University of Washington faculty members and a fairly well-known local politician." (Names not available, of course.)

Wingo explained that he and his wife, Julie, wrote the how-to book - their first - for people who want advice on relationships but "would rather not pay the Wingos those fees."

Mae Day: Two Pike Place Market groups, both calling themselves Friends of the Market, are still at war. (Perhaps one group should become "Enemies of Friends of the Market.") But everyone can get behind Wednesday's big event: Mae West Day.

A 70-something woman, Mae West has been hanging around the market for more than a dozen years. She serves as a surrogate mom to street urchins, a willing baby-sitter for small businesses and a gofer for sick residents. She's often photographed wearing her beer-can hat.

Few, if any, know her real name, but Mae West seems to suit her. She decorates her sweaters with buttons, some with risque messages. She says, "I only like two kinds of men - foreign and domestic."

The Market community will honor Mae West with a reception under the clock at 10:30 a.m. Wednesday. Then they'll parade Mae West down to the Desimone Bridge, where she can hold court the rest of her day.

Live wires: The phone lines lighted up Tuesday at Live Wires, one of the city's oldest singing-stripper services. Owner Sharon Galloway took half a dozen "sorry, wrong numbers" before she began questioning the callers. Turns out they were FBI agents, responding to a group page. Someone had punched in a wrong number. Before she was through, Galloway fielded 20 calls. FBI spokesman Dick Thurston confirms the mistake.

He adds, "A couple of weeks ago, there was a wrong number: the trauma center at Harborview."

Payoff: Puyallup resident Donna Stark wondered about the unmarked package her 11-year-old son, Andy, received in the mail Wednesday. It was a Sonic poster, earned by Andy at a free Seafirst basketball camp.

Stark says, "It arrived in a plain brown wrapper. Now that's taking dejection too far."

Eh? At KPLU-FM, they're asking: What's a Canadian? Answer: It's an unarmed American with a better health plan.

Jean Godden's column appears Sunday, Monday, Wednesday and Friday in the Local News section of The Times. Her phone is 464-8300.