For a time in the seventies I was going out with one of the most formidable women I ever knew. She has achieved quite a lot in her life in areas beyond acting and is known all over the world for her strong feelings about many things. The first time I asked her out she said, “I’ll go out with you, but do something dazzling.” Dazzling, I thought. Right. Yeah. Good luck!
The best I could come up with was to take her to dinner at a really out-of-the-way place that had been around for hundreds of years. I felt she would be impressed by that, and she was. I remember she ordered a Manhattan, which impressed me. Afterward I took her to meet some friends of mine she had worked with, who were also very accomplished. I felt she would be impressed that these were my friends. She was. I don’t remember impressing her much after that, but we continued to go out. I could make her laugh, and that seemed to get me a lot of points, but most of the time she wasn’t laughing but debating me on… well, you name it.
She very much liked to go to the theater, and I didn’t. There was one particular play she wanted to see that I had been told by friends would drive me screaming into the night with boredom. Not to say it wasn’t any good; I’m sure it was, but let’s just say it wasn’t my cup of tea. She said, “If you don’t like it, we’ll leave at intermission.” I said, “Really?” She said, “Absolutely.” We went to see it. It was everything I thought it would be, which meant I wanted to leave at intermission. She then said, “We can’t leave. People from the cast know we’re here.” I looked at her for a long moment and reminded her of our deal. She again said, “People know we’re here.” I stayed.
After the play, as we walked up Broadway, we debated what had happened. We were going to meet some friends of mine, and one of them was an official with Amnesty International, an organization that looks into human rights violations. Not that sitting in a theater past the point where you want to leave would in any way be considered a human rights violation, but I thought presenting our cases to an Amnesty official might inject some much needed humor into our latest debate. When we got to my friend’s apartment, I said we’d had a disagreement and wanted to present the story for her judgment.
At that point my girlfriend piped up and said she was agreeable to this, if she could be the one to describe what happened. Not the first one to describe, the only one! In other words, I would get to say nothing. My Amnesty friend gently said that didn’t seem quite right. I honestly don’t remember what happened after that.
She liked to refer to me, I think affectionately, as having “exotic neuroses.” I don’t remember her ever acknowledging that she wasn’t exactly the girl next door. We eventually went our separate ways, but whenever I run into her over the years, we always have some laughs. Of course, we chat for only a few minutes.
Some relationships just work better that way.
It must be obvious by now that in some of these stories I name names and in others I don’t. Some people deserve to be named, and others deserve the respect of not having that happen.