I knew better. I had about as much business being there as an elderly tourist has of being on Skid Row after midnight with a map in his hand and a blank cashier\’s check taped to his forehead. I was in grave danger of a psychological mugging, and I knew it.
I kept telling myself to walk away, hail an emotional cab and get out fast, but I couldn\’t. The pull was too strong. I had to know.
Am I annoying?
Here\’s the scenario: I travel for work almost 20 days a month. It\’s lonely out there on the road, one long Bob Seger song. Dating is almost impossible, but I\’ve met a guy who seems to fit the suit.
Last week, before the premiere of my new show \”While You Were Out,\” I got my first big national magazine review.
My ex-boyfriend is a star. Just when I thought he was securely fastened in my past, he is suddenly and jarringly in my present, whirring by me on the side of a bus, staring at me from the cover of TV Guide, cracking jokes on late night TV.
When we were little, my brother and I realized that whenever we asked if someone was Jewish, my mother would answer by simply repeating their name, as if that said it all.
I admit, it doesn\’t sound pleasant. You enter a room that\’s been heated to above 100 degrees. The heat isn\’t as suffocating as the odor, a wall of smell that hits you like a thousand stinky shoes.
It happened fast, like swerving out of the way of a stray cat.
I was driving toward the valet parking kiosk of a fancy-pants department store in Beverly Hills. As I approached, I saw clusters of press and well-dressed young women gathered to attend a charity brunch. A Mercedes was coming to a slow stop.
I don\’t know what made me do it; I took a sharp left, veering away from the valet kiosk and into an adjacent public lot.
Like grandma\’s pearls, handed down and worn in, I\’ve inherited an opera-length strand of worries.
\”I\’d like to give you the keys to my apartment,\” he said. This was after our first date, if you could call it that. We met for a couple drinks at a bowling alley bar with all the ambiance of a Greyhound station in Lompoc.
I picked the bowling alley. You don\’t want ambiance when you\’re going on a curiosity date, more gawking than bonding. This guy wasn\’t my type, but he asked me out via e-mail and I\’m a sucker for prose. We\’d had only one brief conversation when I got his e-mail, which ended with this: \”Don\’t dislike me because of how much I like you. If you do, we\’re doomed.\”
More news and opinions than at a Shabbat dinner, right in your inbox.