Tongue-In-Cheek … Foot-In-Mouth

It was junior year in high school.  I should have known that something was up when my “friend” informed me that he had done me a great service by setting me up with a blind date.

Now in high school guys will stoop to absolutely anything in order to get a date with a girl, a cute girl.  Understand that this included offering up their “buds” as human dating sacrifices to what, in many cases, were classified—anthropologically speaking—as distant relatives of the Beast of Bayonne, only slightly uglier, and who came factory equipped with their very own leash.

Our friends—the ones who were trying to get a date with the hot chick—could care less about us, their blind date male sacrificed buds who were busy actually trying to blind ourselves with whatever was handy so that we would not have to look directly at our blind date.  And in-between vicious jabs to our eyeballs, we’d be making up tremendously creative excuses why we had to leave RIGHT THEN after only .00876 seconds on the blind date.

“Bill, this is Gwendolyn; Gwendolyn this is Bill.”

“Hi Bill.”

“Hi (gulp) Gwendolyn.  Bye.”

“Oh, do you have to leave already?  You haven’t fully entered the doorway yet.”

“Er…a…um, I just remembered that I’ve signed up to circumnavigate the globe…on a pogo stick…going backwards.  Yeah.  It’s for charity.  See ya.”

“I’ll wait for you.”

“Don’t bother; it will take years, perhaps decades before I return.”

“I will still wait for you.  I will always wait for you.”

“That’s okay; don’t bother because if I return, I plan to take up refuge in a cave, a deep dark wet, smelly, bug-infested, moss-covered cave in the deepest darkest reaches of the Amazon or perhaps on the moon.”

“I’ll find you.”

“Terrific.”

But anyway, my “friend” John (yeah right!) had “honestly” forgotten to inform me (yeah right!) that the cute girl he wanted to date (who went to our school) said that “she would ONLY go out with him if he could get her friend (who went to another school) a date,” her friend that looked like the result of a horrible scientific experiment gone awry, which had wrongfully attempted to splice together Frankenstein and Barbara Streisand, resulting in something that admittedly looked much, much better than old Babs by herself, but a sickening sight, nonetheless.

Don’t get me wrong: I wasn’t any beauty queen back then myself.  I’m still not; I’m average at best on my best day.  But at least I don’t own a face that can frighten away assorted igneous rock formations.
Anyway, here is the scene: Circa 1977, John and I are walking down the main hallway of Methuen High School, Methuen, MA.

“Bill?”

“Yup?”

“Big surprise.”

“What is it?”

“Unbelievable.”

“Well?”

“There’s this girl that wants to go out with you.”

“Get out of here!  Me?  No way!  Really?”

“Yup.”

“No kidding?  Me?”

“Yup.”

“Did she tell you that she wanted to go out with me?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?  Has she ever seen me?”

“No.”

“Heard about me?”

“She doesn’t know you’re even alive, but trust me she’ll be thrilled.”  (Right then and there I should have run away.)

“How do you know she’d be thrilled?”

“I know.”

“Have you met her?”

“Um…yes, I met her last night.”

“And?”

“And she’s exceptionally smart; has an IQ in the mid 5,000’s; got 1700 on her SATs.  She makes Einstein look like a dope.”

“What does she look like?”

“And funny, God she’s hilarious. She told me this joke about a snake and a porcupine, George Carlin should be so funny.  And what a great personality.”

“Is she pretty?”

“And her dad is loaded, BIG bucks, baby.  I think he’s into oil or maybe it was the gumballs dispensers, not sure, but he’s loaded I tell you.”

“Hello?  Is she p-r-e-t-t-y?  You know, attractive, good looking…sexy?”

“Kind of.”

“Define ‘kind of.’”

“Okay, she has a slight drooling problem, are you happy?”

“A slight drooling problem?”

“It’s because of her two front teeth—”

“What about her two front teeth?”

“They’re a little worn, okay; missing but man can she whistle like nobody’s business.”
Moment of silence.

“Missing front teeth, huh?  Okay, what color is her hair?”

“Hair?”

“Yeah, hair.  She does have hair, doesn’t she?”

“Some—“

“Some?”

“But her wig looks completely natural; you’d never know she was wearing it.  Well, to be honest with you, it occasionally crawls down over her face, but other than that you’d never know she was wearing a wig.  Oh, speaking of hair, she’s having her mustache, back, chest, eyebrow, and sideburns waxed before the date, just for you.  Isn’t that thoughtful of her?”

“Fantastic, can’t wait to meet her.  Anything else I need to know?”

“She has a slight hump on her back.”

“’A slight hump on her back?’  How big is this ‘slight hump on her back?’”

“Oh, I don’t know, say about the size of a basketball or maybe a bowling ball.  But, hey, it’s great for holding onto while you dance.  Oh, yeah, I almost forgot.  She also has bow legs.”

“Bow legs?”

“Yup, but they make her look shorter than she actually is.”

“How tall is she…with her bow legs?”

“About nine feet; almost eleven feet when she straightens them out.”

“Great.  Are you done?”

“Big ears.”

“What?”

“She has big ears.”

“How big?”

“Are you familiar with Dumbo?”

“That’s pretty big.”

“Yeah, but they distract your attention away from her nose, well, what’s left of it…”

Copyright 2008 William Drury, All Rights Reserved.