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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
He thought honest feedback would help him score. It didn't.
Feb 3, 2003 | HELL: So much for the casting couch
At 39, when I moved to Los Angeles, I went on my first blind e-date. A beautiful woman showed up. With a script. It was an "Ally McBeal," a show I'd specced myself -- with some success even -- when it was on the air.
Brief backstory: We TV wannabes tap out "spec" scripts, hoping to get an agent, a staff job or, at the very least, laid. I was pretty naive about L.A. I smugly presumed that if I offered this doe-eyed "writer" some good honest feedback, well ... you know.
OK, I'm a guy. Shoot me.
I read the script. It was OK. I'd read worse, but it needed work. On the whole, it gave off an amateurish vibe. I marked it up in standard writers-groupese ("check" for "good," "better" for "not so good," and well-intentioned, helpful comments in the margins). I handed it off after dinner on our second date, kissed her cheek goodnight, and drove home.
When I got there, there was a message on my machine. A terse, icy one -- all four words "never," "call," "me" and "again" in the same sentence. Ego bruised, I called my best male friend, looking for some sympathy. He bellowed, "You told her the TRUTH?? You IDIOT!!"
A few months later, he introduced me to a woman from Central America who didn't write, had never been online, and didn't own a computer. We married and are expecting our first child in July.
-- Eric Klein, Glendale, CA
HELL: Well, at least Ill never get her pregnant
I have a membership to JDate, which is an online dating service for Jewish singles. I figured that since my friends weren't doing such a stellar job setting me up, I might as well let an impartial computer do some work as well. I met this one woman, we corresponded, we traded pictures, it seemed like we matched up pretty well. So we decided to meet in person.
I took her to a decent restaurant not far from where I lived at the time. It's a cool tavernlike place; I used to go there every so often. Conversation was going decently, we're getting along, I'm thinking "This is good." The topic turns to our upbringing and she asks me, "So, what do your parents do?" Casually as always when I give this response, I said, "My dad's a doctor, and my mom works for Planned Parenthood."
In the middle of the restaurant, among many other perfect strangers and other assorted restaurant staff, this woman stands up and delivers a full-on rant in a very loud voice for around three minutes about what a horrible person my mother was because she was a baby-killer and how could I even associate with this monster?
I didn't want to leave because I frequented this place every now and then and I didn't want to stiff them with the bill, but I had no other idea of what to do, so I just kind of sat there like a deer caught in headlights. She finished her rant and sat back down after a few minutes. I changed the topic to something innocuous, like what movies we'd seen recently, and ended dinner shortly thereafter. I never called her again.
-- Keith Berman, LA
LIMBO: Salon, help me find her
After about a year surfing the Salon personals with little success, I found one entry that fascinated me. A nonsmoker, roughly my age, living, like me, in the Seattle area. She had red hair, she read a lot, there was just the hint of an eye in a picture that was blurry and yet enticing. Hoping that the uniqueness of her picture would ward off the deluge of responses that bury most users of the service, I decided to make one last attempt at finding someone through this medium.
She wrote back later that night, and we settled into a pattern, probably not unique in this regard. She would write in the mid-morning and then I'd respond around midnight that night. Back and forth we went over the next week or so, writing long e-mails about this and that. Cartoons. Taste in music. The awkwardness of telling friends who have just broken up how annoying you thought their former partner. She revealed her name to begin with B, I one-up'd her and gave up that mine started with "Ai".
More similarities emerged. We're both avid readers, we're both politically aware and politically intelligent (read: liberal), both first children, and we're both avid Salon readers. Moreover, we're both, for lack of a better word, dorks.
