Second dates have always been something of a problem with me. For a while, the problem was that they just wouldn't happen. We'd have what I would consider a good first date, and then I would never hear from them again. I remember a couple years ago I went on a date with this red head (shut up, I have a thing) we had dinner and went to see Inception....Pretty good right? I feel like that's a solid itinerary. The next day I sent her a text asking if she had to work. To this very moment, I never found out. What's worse, this was the better part of the Second Date Curse...
The Second Date Curse took an ugly turn the last couple of years. There was this stretch where midway through the second date, the girl I was with decided she hated me. HATED MY ASS!!!
(Oh, Minch. You're over exaggerating...)
The hell I am! Here's a few stories,
I was on a second date with this girl, I don't know, let's call her....Beverly. The second date for Beverly and I consisted of dinner and a movie (Date Night, that was the least of our problems.) Dinner seemed to go perfectly fine, but I had overshot the time and we had a little extra time to wait for the movie. I don't know if was something I said, I did, or thought about doing, but Beverly shut down the moment we got into the theater. Didn't talk to me. Didn't respond when I talked to her. What made this truly nightmarish, was that we were at an independent theater so there were no cartoons, commercials, and behind the scenes movie whats-its to break the silence, only a loop of about 20 slides that we must have watched 80 times...in dead silence. There was a Simpsons episode where Marge says the line, "This date night is worse than the date night we watched Date Night." I lived that joke...
Then there was a second date last year. Let's call her Josephine. Josephine and I had our first date at a Mexican restaurant. As nice a place as it was, in retrospect, dates at Mexican restaurants are asking for trouble. The date itself went perfectly mediocre, and I kind of figured there wouldn't be a second one...meh! Then I got a text from Josephine the next day, much to my surprise. I mentioned that I was thinking about going to the East End Fest* for the first time ever that Friday. Oddly enough Josephine said she wanted to come along. So we made it our second date...
*For any of you reading this beyond the Rochester area, the East End fest is a summer time event that takes place the first Friday of June, July, and August. There's music, there's beer, and more than anything else, there's douchebags and douche-baguettes. I had never been, and wanted to at least see what the fuss was all about.
So we met up and walked in, I paid admission for both of us, as I am a sweetheart. We made our way to the beer truck when Josephine kind of scoffed and said, "I'm not going to drink tonight." That phrase alone is fair and acceptable, but it was said in the same rhythm and cadence that you would say, "Eat shit and die, you whore from Hell." What followed was roughly an hour of Josephine being a pisspot. Everything was terrible, stupid, and beneath her. After an hour, we both decided we should leave. Okay, I may have decided to actively try to annoy her on the way home by pointing out everything and saying, "Hey look, there's a ______. You like that!"
"Hey look, there's a dry cleaner. I know how you love dry cleaning. Want to stop in?"
"Hey look, there's a used book store. I know how you love The Babysitter's Club."
"Hey look, an Arbys, want to stop in for Arby-Q's"
Okay, perhaps not me at my most chivalrous, but I believe it was a necessary evil. So with all of this back story, I'm sure you could understand any trepidation on my part setting up my second date with the girl from Chapter 3. It was kind of spur of the moment. I had spent the entire weekend at the movie house, and what could only be described as a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome, I wanted to watch a movie. I decided to try and make it a date. There are two significant things here:
1) Second Date Curse (see above)
2) First Ever "Home Game" - I don't bring dates to my own theater.
I really don't have any concern bringing girls to meet my family. Fran is friendly, and my brother and sister both have significant others that can curb them from being dickholes. So it's pretty low risk. On the other hand, bringing them to the theater? That's scary. It's like taking them to meet your second family, your "Hills Have Eyes" family (depending on who's working.) Fortunately, everyone on that evening was quite acceptable,. though I did have to warn the concession employees to be on their best behavior.
We went to go see Brave (in 3D, I pull out all the stops.) This isn't a terrible surprise for the late show of a cartoon, even a Pixar, but the theater was completely empty. Completely. Trust me, I looked around to see if Joy and Vince were somewhere in the theater spying.
Something kind of crazy happened at the end of the second date...we were still speaking to each other! Pleasantly, no less! And talking about going out again! In one shot, I knocked two monkeys off of my back. For those of you wondering, the movie is quite good.
Curse Broken...FOR NOW!!!
Chapter 6 is going to show up quicker than you imagine. It's like one of those movies where they film two back to back, but not terrible like The Matrix sequels. Thanks for all of the support and your continued reading. Feel free to share this, or any of your favorite MVW's on TwitterBook or Insta-Face by clicking the links below.
Thanks,
Minch
No comments:
Post a Comment