What are THEY writing about ME?

After much deliberation about how appropriate my blog would be for a parental audience, I showed my mom my blog. While she was amused to read the stories she's already heard me tell ad nauseum, she did wonder out loud whether I thought there were any 'ex-dates' out there who would be tempted to write similar stories about their experiences with me. While I have obviously dated plenty of men who were not inclined to go for a second date, there are only three experiences that I can think of which would warrant re-telling for amusement purposes.

Coming in at number 3 is my cousin's wife's brother (mentioned briefly in "The Recurring Bad Date"). From my perspective, the date was great fun: in fact, I remember claiming I had never met anyone who could be that funny and still maintain a deadpan face all night long. He literally cracked me up. But from his perspective? It must have felt like a never-ending episode with a giggle machine. How was I to know that he was being dead serious about his childhood traumas, when his stories were so hilarious they made me cry with laughter? There he was, baring his soul about some of his life's deepest disturbances, and I treated his tale of woe as a night of stand-up never to be forgotten. Not too surprising that I never heard from him again…

With incident number 2, I was introduced to a friend of a friend of a friend. The blindest kind of date possible – where two mutual friends decided to fix up two of their friends, having never met one of the two people being introduced. And since the meeting is through 'friends', there's no swapping of pictures beforehand and no idea what to expect when waiting for your date to arrive. All I knew was that we would meet on a corner in Herzliyya on a warm spring night. I arrived a little early, and was chatting to a friend on the phone – laughing actually, with my mouth wide open – when a fly chose to make a swift entrance into my mouth and was promptly swallowed. The person I was talking to bore aural witness to the episode, as he listened to me trying desperately to regurgitate the fly before it took up permanent residence in my body. The noises emerging from the back of my throat sounded a lot like the Chinese man in Monty Python who had a pubic hair caught in the back of his throat (as my friend generously pointed out). My friend, however, only got to hear my attempts to free the fly. What he did not get to witness were the contortions that accompanied the GGGHHHHHHHHHHHAAAHHHH sounds, including back-slapping, torso swaying (resembles head banging but with the entire upper body region moving backward and forward violently), and vigorous head shaking, in a desperate effort to dislodge the creature making its way down my throat. Got the picture? So did the blind date, innocently walking up the street to meet someone who seemed to be having a very loud epileptic fit on the street corner. Perhaps due to his European sensibilities, he did not see fit to ask why I was doing the kazatzka on the street – and due to my personal South African inhibitions, I couldn't bring myself to actually tell this man I'd never met that I'd swallowed a fly. One glass of wine later, he made a break for it, understandably never to be heard from again.

And the number one story, which I've dined out on for years, is only a 'dating' story in my own imagination. It happened many years ago, when I carried a few kilos less in body weight and a few layers more in self confidence. I was a student at Hebrew University and a friend who was studying in the States asked me to get a Hebrew translation of a philosophy book for him from the university bookstore. I approached the man at the counter to ask whether they had the book in stock, and saw his face light up like he'd just won the jackpot. He went into a diatribe on the book, the quality of the translation, the author…at which point I came to the realization that this guy who looked like he'd walked straight off the set of 'Revenge of the Nerds' had fallen for me: hook, line and sinker. And while he continued to rant on, I could literally picture him calling his mother later to tell her he'd met 'the one'. It was several seconds later that I realized he'd asked a question and I hadn't heard what he asked. When I asked him to repeat his question, he asked me for my phone number. At this point I was faced with the age-old dilemma – do I give him my real number and kick myself afterwards? Do I give him a false number and feel guilty afterwards? Or do I tell a little white lie and let him down gently? I went for the latter, explaining that while he seemed to be a great guy, I had a boyfriend and was not available. At which point he looked directly at me and said, "Ok. I have a wife and a baby at home. Now that we've cleared up our personal situations, how would you like me to reach you when the book you're looking for arrives?". I can only imagine how many times HE's eaten out on that story…