You are on Candid Camera!
As a single girl, one of the worst things you can ever hear is a half-trusted friend saying something to the tune of “I have someone you have GOT to meet! He would be perfect for you!!” And when you ask “Oh yeah? What’s he like?” The answer is almost always “He’s… umm… a really nice guy.”
Mmm hmmm. I’m sure he is.
The blind date is a precarious situation. It can be awkward, it can be boring, it can be stunning. It’s a roll of the dice. It’s also somewhat stressful.
Do you allow them to come to your house? And risk the possibility of them becoming some wild-eyed stalker, looking in your windows at night and cutting down your flowers just to give them to you? That last one actually happened to me.
Or do you meet them out somewhere, and throw all gentlemanly, chivalrous behavior out the window?
Oh the decisions!
I’ve been on several blind dates. Half of them have been mediocre and exactly one of them has been downright horrific, forcing me to ask myself if I could possibly be on candid camera.
My first (and worst) brush with blind dating was when I was 17. My hairdresser decided she wanted to set me up with her “19-year-old” nephew. I gave in after months of prodding (and a threat to fry my hair or turn it awful shades of “old lady”). Within days, a guy in his mid-20’s showed up at my house on a school night, with each eye going opposite directions and black curly hair full of SoulGlo straight out of the movie Coming to America. I found myself looking for plastic to put on the back of the couch before he sat down. On the way to Cinema6, he loudly sang along to the trumpet part on a Miles Davis CD (perfectly fine alone, completely awkward when you have a passenger), his choice of movie was The Green Mile, which he had just seen the day before at the theater.
15 minutes into this terribly sad movie, he started crying, when nothing sad was even going on! It began with a single tear down his cheek and ultimately he was wailing. Loudly. For the rest of the movie. He kept putting his arm around me and I was squirming out of it. Then he was going in for the hand-hold and I was able to get out of it each time until he caught me off guard once and grabbed it firmly. He then proceeded to use the back of my hand as a tissue. Gross! I excused myself to go to the bathroom to sanitize my entire body. I then had to return to my seat for the next THREE HOURS with the crying jeri-curled funky-eyed guy. When we finally left that horrible experience of a movie, I felt so sorry for him that I agreed to go to a local restaurant with him.
I was exhausted and he was puffy eyed and embarrassed, so we looked like quite the pair walking into Montana Restaurant. The waitress handed me a Shirley Temple and he handed me a Sony Discman. Remember back in the day when this contraption fit an entire cd? These things weren’t small and where did he possibly have it stowed away on his person? I know he wasn’t carrying it when we came into the restaurant because he kept trying to hold my hand.
And all this time, I thought the date couldn’t get worse. Now I’m supposed to listen to a cd. Not just any cd – one that contains a song that he wrote for me. Considering this is a blind date, I ask how he came about writing a song for me. He said it was based on the emails we sent back and forth. To which I replied, “Oh, the one email where I told you how to get to my house?!”
I’m in the Twilight Zone.
I high-tailed it out of there as quickly as possible and never saw him again. Bless his heart. I sure hope his moves have gotten better, or he has no hope.
The inspiration behind today’s writing is the fact that, I have hope that out there somewhere is a good blind date. I know, it sounds like an oxymoron. But it’s gotta be true.
Till next time!
XOXO
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