Blind dates, dogs and dildos

I was always intrigued by the idea of a blind date – until I actually went on two.

During a dateless period of my single life, I allowed my co-worker Leana to set me up on a blind date with a friend of her boyfriend's. We decided a baseball game would be fun, and she and her boyfriend would come along too.

I was mildly intrigued, since it was my first blind date. But Blind Date 1 or BD1 - was short (sorry, I'm not, and I don't like dating guys shorter than me), humorless, and we had zero chemistry.

BD1 didn't seem interested in anything, including me, and I sure wasn't interested in him. At one point he told me he would soon be traveling to Tahiti.

"Wow," I said, "That's really exciting."

"Yeah - I guess so," was BD1's brilliant response.

I found him so irritatingly boring that I became a bad girl. He told me he hated smoking, so I lit up a cigarette. I drank lots of beer. I made fun of him with Leana when we had retreated to the food stand for more beer, cigarettes and girl talk.

"I'm so sorry!" she said. "He was nice when I met him before!"

When BD1 dropped me off that night, I nearly leapt out of the car. "Bye!" I shouted over my shoulder as I raced for my front door. I'm sure he was just as happy to see me go.

Turns out that BD1 had been recently dumped by his longtime girlfriend, which accounted for his moroseness. Nasty me surely didn't help, but I wasn't in the mood to be his shrink. I had also recently suffered through the first of three breakups with my Torturous Moody Boyfriend. I had just wanted a good time, some diversion. I resented the fact that BD1 couldn't supply even a little of that. After all, I was trying!

My second and last blind date was also to a ball game (I should have known!). My friend Sue told me that she had met a friend of her fiancée's at a party, and she thought we would get along. He was a journalist in another city, and smart and funny. Hmm, sounded promising, and as I was in the midst of breakup #2 from Torturous Moody, I figured why the hell not.

On the morning of the game, I got a call from Sue. She was at her fiancée's apartment, and BD2 was there as well.

"Uh, hi, are you still planning on coming to the game?" she asked.

"Sure!" I replied, "I'll see you there."

Stupid me. I didn't get that she was trying to warn me.

The perk of this blind date was a luxury box at the stadium, courtesy of Sue's employer. Food, drinks – lots of beers! – and best of all, a private bathroom. Cushioned seats, too. What more could you want?

I was introduced to BD2. "Hi," he said tonelessly, holding out his hand to shake. I looked down in horror, as I realized he had warts on his fingers. Now I can tolerate some odd things – facial tics, baldness – but warts just give me the heebie-jeebies. I must have given him a limp fish shake as I attempted my best fake smile.

It was kind of downhill from there. The guy was another morose, monosyllabic bore.

I don't remember much of the game. I think I ate and drank a lot. That part was good. At one point, Sue and I took a walk outside of the box.

"I'm so sorry!" she laughed, trying to keep a straight face. "I tried to warn you when I called this morning! When I met him before at that party, he must have been drunk – he's really boring when he's sober!"

Ironic – I had spent 2 years trying to deal with Torturous Moody's overindulgences – cocaine, alcohol - and this guy was actually worse sober than drunk.

For some reason, I did not feign a headache or a family emergency after the ballgame. I actually went back with the three of them to Sue's fiancée's apartment (I was used to being a somewhat of a glutton for punishment in those days). We entertained ourselves playing with his collection of odd wind-up toys, including dentures with legs. Someone had the great idea of going to a movie. Seemed ok to me – air conditioning (it was hot, hot, hot out) and a chance to see the then-new Spike Lee film, She's Gotta Have It. Well, why not, I thought. Maybe he'll relax, and I'd wanted to see the movie anyway.

The movie theatre was really small and cramped. The seats were miniscule. I had to tensely hold my legs together to keep them from bumping into BD2's (at least he wasn't short). If' you've ever seen She's Gotta Have It, you know that the first scene is a close-up of a guy's tongue on a girl's big tit. Then the movie proceeds to one sex scene after another. In between the sex scenes are scenes of people talking about sex. Great stuff to watch when you're sitting next to a blind date that you wouldn't want to naked wrestle with for all the vodka in Russia.

I forget the rest of the evening. Somehow I got home. BD2 gave me a ride, which was at least polite. I already had a hangover from the baseball beer. I think I said something lame like, "Nice meeting you!" as I again bolted for the door.

Post-date findings for BD2 were frighteningly similar to BD1's: recent bad breakup. Depressed. Miserable. My blind date M.O.

I never went on another blind date after that. I figured if I wanted bad dates, I could arrange those myself.

I do have a good friend who actually met his wife on a blind date. Amazing. And she has no warts, either. So it does work for some.

But my sister has the all-time best blind date story.

She realized within minutes of meeting her blind date for lunch – we'll call him Dave for some reason – that she would never, ever kiss him and never ever, ever sleep with him. He just wasn't for her. I think on blind dates there should be some 10 minute grace period where either party can say, "I'm sorry, this just isn't working for me," and you can call the whole thing off, no hard feelings.

But there isn't, and she had to be cheerful and date-like for a few hours. Dave and she went to lunch and then were going off to some event. She needed to stop at her house on the way.

"Great!" he said. I think he was actually hopeful of a little action, even if sis only wanted to change her shoes.

She introduced Dave to her animals – she has many – and went outside to check on her semi-moronic large dog, Trixie. Trixie had dug a giant hole in the yard, and came gleefully bounding over with something in her mouth – buried treasure, now unearthed! Too late, sis realized with horror what Trixie was clasping in her jaws: a huge foot-long black dildo! (Sis was only renting the house, and the previous owners had been interesting, to say the least).

She grabbed a paper bag on the patio and was trying to wrestle the dildo out of the dog's mouth when Dave started coming over.

"What's that she's got?" he asked. "Can I help?"

Similar to the situation of me pinned in a seat next to BD2 at a sex film, the last thing Sis wanted to share with Dave was the discovery of enormous sex toy – dug up in her own back yard, no less!

"Oh it's nothing!" she assured him, as she continued to wrestle the dildo away. "

Bad dog, bad dog," she hissed to Trixie under her breath. She finally grabbed Big Black Dildo free and shoved it in the paper bag as Dave approached.

"Let me just throw this old bone out and we can be on our way!" she chirped.

Had any good blind dates?

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Jane gets racy

Now this looks like fun - after all, don't most Jane Austen fans secretly wish that there had been a peek into the bedrooms at Pemberley?

An author named Arielle Ecstut published this in 2004, announcing it on April Fools Day on the radio. Here's the premise, courtesy of Amazon.com:

Synopsis
In 2002, two amateur Jane Austen scholars, while staying at a Hertfordshire estate, stumbled upon a hidden cache of manuscript pages and made an extraordinary literary discovery - lost scenes from Jane Austen's novels that reveal an altogether different dimension to her oeuvre. Hidden by Jane Austen's younger sister Cassie in 1818, these missing pages throw an entirely new light on all of Austen's work making explicit the latent and repressed sexuality that underlies much of her fiction. The discovery also forces new assessments of Austen herself. For along with these pages they found letters to her editor, Thomas Egerton, and her sister arguing and anguishing over the extensive cuts that she was asked to make in order for her novels to be seen as acceptable and decent to her publisher. Pride and Promiscuity is a landmark publication of indescribable importance.

Apparently, many folks took it seriously! Now of course, I have to find it and read it.

Here's a very funny article about it.

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