i am suave and sophisiticated

My brother and I were exchanging stories of our late teenage years and early twenties, focusing on the ones that illustrated our social ineptitude, stupidity, and general uselessness with girls.
It was kind of horrifying-yet-compelling – like a car crash – to think about some of the things that even 20 yrs later have the power to make us blush, squirm, and break into a sweat of retroactive embarrassment.

So, naturally, I’ll have to blog one. We’ll be merciful and pick a not-very-embarrassing one, but we’ll still pretend it was one of my brother’s…

Marie had been in my grade thru Jr High and High School, and had kind of liked me once upon a time. Since I was shy, dorky, broke as a joke, stupidly dressed, and socially clueless, I had never considered more than saying Hi to her in the hall.

Marie had been kind of gawky herself (skinny, braces, freckles, etc) – but since HS had blossomed in a big way. She now looked terrific – very pretty, great figure, even “doing a little modeling”, meaning a pic of her under a waterfall in a pink bikini appeared in swimwear illustrated.

But to the point:
We’re 2-3 yrs out of high school, and I’m hanging with her older brother Mike. Mike says to me, “You know, Marie just isn’t meeting any nice guys – they’re all losers -- she needs a good guy. You should ask her out, you guys were friends, right?”

So I did. And we went to a local production of Fiddler on the Roof. I wore tight white 501’s, boots, and a pastel shirt (it was the eighties, back off).

It didn’t take me long to figure out that this was a disaster -- Marie wasn’t in the market for a nice guy at all. She was having a great time meeting older, faster, slicker, richer guys than she’d ever been with before – she didn’t need some loser from HS to pick her up in his gigantic hand-me-down station wagon and go see a small-town musical production. It was just her *big brother* who thought she ought to be with someone square and tame and safe – she had a completely different program going.

At intermission she asked if I was wanting to stay for the whole thing, or what, because she had remembered she had a lot of things to do at home. Since I really like FotR, and since I knew the date was doomed anyway, I said I did want to stay (what a bozo). Anyway, as soon as the thing was over, I drove her home – she said bye, scooted out of the car, and I never saw her again.