WOMAN LOOKS TO SPICE UP LIFE IN HIGH-IQ CLUB.

Byline: Terri Langford Associated Press 

Being a genius ain't all quantum physics.

Even the smartest 2 percent among us admit problems with, well, meeting people.

``I've learned that I'm not particularly outgoing,'' said Laurie Berg, 50, of Thousand Oaks. ``It's still hard. Smart people are just as insecure as others.''

Berg is smart. Very smart. So a year ago, she decided to join Mensa, the Fort Worth-based international organization of brainy folk, where a score of at least 132 on an IQ test is the only membership requirement.

To those of us with merely average gray matter, Mensa evokes the haughty ivory towers of academia or a group of white coats huddled around scientific notation furiously scribbled on a blackboard.

But Mensa's mission is anything but rocket science. Its members - some of the 1,500 who gathered in Houston this week for the group's 50th annual convention - say Mensa is just a great way to meet people and socialize.

``I wanted a way to meet men who wouldn't be intimidated by the fact that I was smart,'' said Berg, who co-manages Tom Anderson Guitarworks, a company that manufactures electric guitars.

For more living proof, there's S. Gail Skvarenina and her husband, Gary Maycroft. The two met at a Mensa conference in Chicago in 1977. Five months later, they were married and now live in Scottsdale, Ariz., where they both work for Motorola in manufacturing operations.

``A lot of people think (of us) `they're smart' and that we do everything well and that's not true,'' said Skvarenina, 47, a Mensa member since 1971. ``A lot of people are insecure. . . . some of us don't have a lot of common sense.''

Skvarenina says she was more shy when she joined more than 20 years ago. Maycroft, looking over the raucous hospitality room at downtown's Hyatt Regency, nods in agreement with some members' assertion that growing up smarter than the pack can sometimes hamstring social development.

And as any junior high school student can tell you, appearing different is not an admirable quality.

``Here, there are no social outcasts,'' Maycroft said.

Dick Martin, 55 of Fairborn, Ohio, works in military sales as a civilian for the U.S. Air Force.

``I had a very lonely life until I joined Mensa. All of a sudden, I had a very rich social life,'' Martin said. ``We are essentially a social club.''

And it's a social club that is less on facts and figures and IQ test results and more on fun. Oh, there's the seminars on ``Shifting Paradigms Into The Third Millennium'' and Japanese netsukes (miniature sculptures), but there's also one informing members about the joys of owning ferrets as pets.

As for IQ talk, it's kept at a minimum.

``The only ones that talk about it (IQ test results) are new members,'' explains Keith Brown, 43, who writes software for NASA in Clear Lake and joined Mensa in 1980.

When asked her IQ, Berg laughs.

``Haven't a clue.''

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Photo: A ferret is cuddled at the annual Mensa convention in Houston .

Associated Press