Melanie McAllen is probably not unlike many of the quirky personalities that live in Chicago's Logan Square neighborhood. A 60-year-old lesbian, gardener, biker and registered nurse, McAllen has lived in the neighborhood for 15 years.
Dyslexic, she said she somehow graduated high school with honors without being able to add or subtract, and managed her way through odd jobs. McAllen said her first job was selling clothes, and she had to walk around the store and memorize all the possible combinations of prices and taxes.
"It was always a huge gap, and I always felt a little weird," she told Windy City Times in an interview.
It was then that McAllen took a Mensa test. Mensa is a social organization for individuals who have an IQ in the top 2 percent of the overall population.
According to Chicago-Area Mensa President Beth Anne Demeter, Mensa is about giving meaning to intelligent life, and providing a structure for individuals to come together. She said many Mensa members are introverts who want to connect with others, but don't always know how. According to Demeter, the Chicago-area Mensa is the third largest in the United States with a membership of more than 1,800.
When McAllen received her test score and found out that her IQ was in the top two percent of the population, she realized that what she always knew was weird and different about her was in fact a gift.
"I like it because I think it is kind of fun, as goofy as my thinking is," McAllen said. "You do a lot of tangential stuff when you have huge gaps—you find walk arounds."
"Mensa is filled with other people that are sort of like me, that are quirky, that have an odd perspective," she said.
McAllen said Mensa brought her affirmation. In her opinion, gay and trans people tend to be highly intelligent.
"I'm convinced that queers are smarter than the average bear," she said. "It's not easy being queer, we all come out by ourselves in our little corner of the world."
McAllen said her girlfriend, a long-haul truck driver who runs a Chicago gender outlaws group, hasn't taken the test yet, but is definitely Mensa material.
And she says Mensa is an extremely welcoming group for people from all walks of life, from IT people to taxi drivers and locksmiths, to queer people.
McAllen's favorite event is the annual Halloween party that the Chicago-area Mensa is well known for. She goes every year, as do Mensa members from across the country. For the entire weekend before Halloween, the group will plan dances, balls, games, costumes and events in a hotel.
It was at the Halloween party that McAllen said she first learned about S&M in the' 80s. Every Halloween party, at midnight on Saturdays, there is lecture on an adult topic. One year, she was surprised to see many of her friends that she had known for years come out in dog collars and leather.
"And then they started explaining about tops and bottoms and all this stuff," she said.
While she thinks Mensa can have a bad connotation about being stuck up, it's the opposite.
"It's really fun. It's people that are a kind of class who like to be outrageous."
This year's annual Halloween party, "HalloweeM38: Gone Wild," will be from Oct. 24—27.
Mensa is offering discounted Mensa home testing for $1 to support Mensa Membership Month and National Mensa Testing Day in October. The Mensa Home Test can be found at www.us.mensa.org/MHT.
