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When two guys are flavors of the month, they sell a lot of ice cream

By Sarah Kershaw
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, NEW YORK
Sunday, Aug 04, 2002, Page 12

After appearing on People magazine's ``Top 50 Bachelors'' list, Bruce, left, and his brother, Mark Becker's love lives and ice cream business have boomed. PHOTO: NY TIMES

It's not easy being a bachelor in New York City. Sure, the urban singles scene might sound exciting to someone from Idaho, but it can be a dog-eat-dog world of broken hearts, melted dreams and blind dates from hell.

Let's face it, not many of the city's eligible guys look like George Clooney, Ben Affleck or Justin Timberlake.

But what if you were two nice Jewish brothers from Queens and you decided to make really weird flavors of kosher ice cream -- like horseradish, lox and corn -- and then your ice cream became a craze and then a very popular magazine decided to include you in its annual list of the country's 50 most eligible bachelors?

"Here are 50 whose ranks include Hollywood's hottest actors, pop stars, Olympic athletes and more," says the introduction to People magazine's annual feature, "The Top 50 Bachelors," published this year on June 24.

"More" would be the category for the Becker brothers, unattached ice cream makers who in 1997 opened Max & Mina's on Main Street in Kew Gardens Hills, naming it after their grandparents. (Location of Queens bachelors: Page 86, the guys in the lipstick-red Thunderbird convertible, holding ice cream cones.)

And bizarre would be one word to describe what has happened over the last few weeks to Mark Becker (28, 174cm, "flirtatious but clearheaded") and Bruce Becker (34, 180cm, "has a really good heart") since their debut in People.

The day the bachelor feature hit the stands, Mark Becker arrived at the ice cream store to find approximately 50 messages on the answering machine, he said. (The People issue was preceded by televised interviews with Clooney, Affleck, Timberlake of 'N Sync, and the Beckers on Dateline NBC.)

Among the messages: "Hey, this is Susan from Texas. I love ice cream. Give me a call."

"Hi, it's Joanne from Louisiana. I think you guys are cute. Call me."

In the weeks that followed, the brothers received dozens of love letters soaked in perfume, hundreds more telephone calls and some rather strange packages. A woman from Palm Springs, California, left a message saying that she had arranged for the brothers to take an all-expenses-paid trip to California to meet her two daughters.

In the mail, there were chocolates, one suede slipper ("call me if you want the other one"), and a wafer cone stuffed with a pink-and-white thong and a poem in lipstick, a kind of ode to ice cream.

In People, Mark Becker had described the ideal woman as someone willing to try garlic ice cream, one of Max & Mina's flavors. He received an amorous letter from a garlic lover, addressed to Mark "Garlic" Becker, and the letter paper had been saturated in garlic oil.

One question reverberating through the Becker family is: Who knew?

"I mean, do you expect your children to be listed among Ben Affleck, and who's that other one? Clooney?" said the Beckers' mother, Elinor, who lives in Lawrence, New York, on Long Island, where Mark, Bruce and their two sisters grew up. "It's something I never dreamed. A Jewish mother, does she dream that her sons would be among the 50 most eligible bachelors?"

People has hundreds of its correspondents around the country on the lookout for interesting men who may not have found that special someone.

There are no-brainers, like Timberlake, who in the bachelor issue tells the magazine about "love, liberty and life" after his breakup with Britney Spears. In the case of the ice cream guys in Queens (they actually live in Manhattan), a newspaper article about their flavors caught an editor's attention, according to Danielle Dubin, a reporter and writer for People who is closely involved in the bachelor selection process.

"The litmus test is that they must be single and doing something interesting, at the top of their game," Dubin said. "And we try to find a good mix. There are celebrities who don't have it all, and then there are the guys right next door, right under your nose."

For the most part, the brothers do not seem to mind the explosion of overtures -- or all the buzz about their business.

Truth be told, the Becker brothers said they were not having a whole lot of trouble meeting women before. As it turns out, ice cream is an excellent icebreaker.

"People come in to get ice cream to forget about reality," said Bruce Becker. "One lick can change anybody's mood. You just don't have this with burgers and fries."
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