Sex & the 60s

They say a picture is worth a thousand words—but I guess it has to be a recent picture. I walked into the restaurant and immediately spotted a man sitting in a booth alone. I found myself praying that he was not Stanley. I went up to the hostess and said I had a reservation under the name Stan, and to my delight, she led me to an empty booth. But before I could even sit down, a second hostess came over and asked, “Aren’t you meeting a gentleman here?” I answered in the affirmative. She said, “Isn’t that him over there?” I said, “I don’t know.” She said, “Well I think it is, because he’s been waiting a long time for a lady.” In retrospect, she was saying a mouthful.

Reluctantly, I made my way to the other booth and graciously reached out my hand to greet Stanley. Let’s just say his photo was probably taken in 1990 and the intervening years had not been kind.

Or let’s just say he wasn’t for me. I knew it in an instant, which made the next two hours seem like two days.

It wasn’t that there was nothing to talk about. I think I can keep up my end of a conversation with almost anyone. What made it uncomfortable was my awareness that he was definitely attracted to me. He told me I was much prettier than my pictures.

I kept the talk general and impersonal: about his business, about the Avon 3-Day Breast Cancer walk in which I had participated. From our profiles he knew that I was a widow and I knew he was divorced. What came out during the evening was that he’d been divorced three times, and the last one had been 25 years ago! Had I been swept off my feet, I might have ignored that obvious red flag, but that wasn’t a problem.

What was a problem was his sense of humor, which consisted of teasing the waitress to the point of embarrassment. For example, his idea of funny was to pretend for an interminable amount of time that she had brought him the wrong entrée. He was the only one of the three of us who was entertained by the “joke.”

When he asked if I felt like taking a little walk after dinner, I realized that he was alluding to my ideal date information. I’m too nice to “just say no,” so I said I thought I could maybe walk a block in my heels.

I couldn’t wait to get into my car and leave. He tried to give me a kiss goodbye and I managed to have it land on my cheek. I drove home, sent him a polite note thanking him for dinner and wishing him luck in his quest for a woman, making it perfectly clear that it would not be me.

I was so depressed that I turned around and drove twenty miles to a gathering of my incredibly entertaining and wonderful writer, producer, director, stand-up comic friends and drowned my sorrows in a Diet Coke.

I bent the ear of the nearest adorable and very married man in his thirties, and said I needed a young and funny fix. He’s the producer/creator of one of the top network sitcoms and though we hadn’t met before that night, we knew each other from our postings on the chat room site to which we contributed almost daily.

I swore him to secrecy and told him about my evening. He promised that I never had to go out with anyone old and boring again.

Was I about to give up, based on a bad date? No way! Little did I know that my producer buddy was right that I could find young and funny, even at my age. I’m not a quitter, nor should you be. Keep your sense of humor. There’s always something to laugh about after a dismal evening…in retrospect.