One night my husband and I had a conversation about the worst dates we have ever had in our lives. Jim told me about one time when he accompanied his date to a dance, and he was invited to dance by another woman. Jim’s date saw him dancing with this other woman, and she got incredibly jealous. Jim’s date, whose name was Jackie, took her cup of coca cola and tipped it in such a way that her drink splashed Jim in the face. Jackie was asked to leave the party by those who had witnessed this spectacle, and Jim went out after her to try to make sense of this rather unusual scene. This didn’t stop there, however.
After they stopped seeing each other, Jackie didn’t stop thinking about Jim. She began to make all kinds of calls to his parents’ house just to reach him. To make matters even worse, Jim was the son of a well-known music composer who was also the neighbor of a famous actor. Jackie actually called the movie studio where this actor worked and asked for Jim, which was an embarrassment for Jim and his father. This woman would also make literally hundreds of calls to Jim’s parents’ house in hopes of being able to talk to Jim. She called so often that his parents were forced to put a trace on the phone number so that they could see who was calling. Jim finally answered the phone one day and he said,
“What do you want, Jackie?”
“I want to get pregnant with you!”
“Are you nuts? Don’t call me again!”
Shortly after this phone call, Jim received a letter in the mail from this woman calling him and his family a bunch of profane unpleasantries and a week or so after that he received a cassette tape through the mail on which Jackie recorded:
“I am sorry for all of the phone calls and my profanity filled letter, but I was frustrated, and I wanted a hot fudge sundae!”
Jim wasn’t the only one to have had a date from hell. One night I drove over to pick up a guy that I had met at work, so that we could have a nice romantic dinner together. Unfortunately, he kept me waiting for an hour and a half while he spoke on the phone to another girl on a long distance call. I should have seen the signs then that this date was not going to turn out too well, but I figured that I would just overlook this and enjoy the evening. William eventually got off of the phone, and we headed for Beckham’s Place, a wonderful prime rib restaurant, in Pasadena. The dinner didn’t go at all well.
Everything was fine in the beginning. I was even pleased at first that my friend asked my permission to drink alcohol, since he knew that I didn’t drink myself. The dinner came, and we had a nice prime rib meal and a very pleasant conversation. I even felt as if I were in date heaven because I really enjoyed this man’s company. All of this changed, however, when the bill came. Instead of paying for the bill himself or even offering to pay for his own meal, William had the gall to ask me,
“Can you afford this?”
I was so angry and humiliated. Not only did this young man have the audacity to keep me waiting before we even left his house, but he had the gall to expect me to pay the whole $46 bill myself without so much as even offering to pay for himself. My friends later told me that I should have walked out of the restaurant and left him with the bill. I didn’t do that, however, but I didn’t see him again for quite some time. We eventually stopped seeing each other altogether.
Thankfully my husband and I met one another in Palm Springs back in 1999, and we got married in 2002. Yet even he and I had a little mishap on our first date. We met during a bowling league and one evening we decided that we would go get some frozen yogurt after we got through bowling. When we got to the frozen yogurt place, we placed our order and, when it came time to pay, we realized that neither one of us had any money! We had to go to the nearest bank to withdraw some money to pay for the yogurt and then we had to come back and stand in line all over again! YIKES! How embarrassing it was for neither one of us to have any money on our first date! Needless to say, we never made that mistake again, and our dates together since have been as if they were sent from heaven.
