Finally! After twenty dates, I was finally having a date outside, to go biking in San Francisco. I guessed (to myself and all my friends) that this might be Tripper’s “first date” test. He was way into the sport of biking and it made sense that he would want to meet biking ladies,
which I wasn’t, but I didn’t mind donning spandex if I happened to be at the right poundage.
He was wearing a bright red biking top made of some fabric with special wicking designed to keep the wearer dry, plus he was sporting a bright red, streamlined, aerodynamic helmet. Truth be told, he looked like a super dork, but I was willing to learn more about him. We chatted briefly, then cycled off towards the Embarcadero and down Bay Street to Fort Mason, an old armory on the San Francisco waterfront. From there we took a bike path that traversed a nice little park that dumped us out near the Marina Green.
We soon passed the Palace of Fine Arts building, a beautiful remnant of the Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915. If you’ve ever seen the Alfred Hitchcock film, Vertigo, it’s the museum where Jimmy Stewart stalks Kim Novak while she sits and stares at the painting of Carlotta Valdes.
The sun was shining brightly. I was feeling very vibrant to be riding past all this cool San Francisco history on my bike. And then the Golden Gate Bridge loomed before us. I begged like a little kid to cross over it on our bikes, and Tripper, the digital effects guy, finally acquiesced, although he didn’t see the big deal I was making over it.
“Probably because it’s only like the most significant landmark in California, besides the La Brea Tar Pits,” I said to my lanky, bright-red stop-sign of a date, which was the longest sentence uttered on this date thus far.
As we crossed the bridge, other cyclists twenty feet ahead of me were suddenly eaten by the fog while the wind was gusting so hard I was having trouble controlling my bike. I rammed into the guardrail a few times, but I didn’t care. I was grinning like a moron and loving every minute of it. I was crossing the Golden Gate Bridge on my bike.
Hey everybody! Look at me!
Once safely on the north side, Tripper was quite pleased that I was quite pleased. My smile was so contagious that a group of Asian tourists asked me to pose in a photo with them taken by a sign that read “Golden Gate Bridge.”
Riding back across the bridge, the wind off the Pacific was incredible. It whipped us around at possibly thirty miles per hour. My smile was still going strong, and it continued past all the gorgeous scenery and even into the cool bar we went to in the Sunset District.
I really liked Tripper’s city and his lifestyle. But he looked goofy in his spandex, and didn’t even bother removing his bike helmet as we enjoyed our après-bike Shiner Bock beer.
I watched him as I waited in line for the bathroom and felt sort of embarrassed to rejoin him at our table, even though I was still on my biking high. My smile disappeared, however, when he announced that we could get up in the morning and ride south to Lake Merced. I couldn’t believe he actually thought I was going to stay the night with him, and he couldn’t believe that I actually wasn’t.
Two weeks had gone by and I had racked up an unimpressive slew of meetings. My dad wanted to hear about my progress but I wasn’t sure if he’d either enjoy my sagas, or pity his single daughter. I had shared some of my more mild dates with him, and I knew he was patiently waiting for me to call him up one day with a success story of an actual second date. He wanted to know if I had a nice time with that nice accountant I was off to meet the other evening.
“Bill was boring, just like every other Bill I’ve ever dated. Just boring and simple, and I’m not being harsh. We were sitting in yet another Santana Row eatery, where he was telling me that he loved television and would come home to it every night after work. He’d look at his dating profiles and see no responses, then retreat to his plush recliner, where he would then lower himself complacently into his abyss of an evening by clicking the remote. He had zero enthusiasm about it and knew that it was pathetic that he was even telling me about it, much less living it.
“Nothing interested him, nothing moved him, and nothing did much of anything for him. So how could I expect this guy to carry a relationship, or even an engaging conversation? So I thought I’d take the ball into my court with Bill and tell a story of my relationship with television. You know, the Mary Tyler Moore, story?”
He knew it, alright. I was a full-time ballroom dancer back in 1992-93, when my dance partner (and boyfriend) suddenly decided to move to New York and get his Ph.D. in philosophy. I was heartbroken and had to quit my dancing gig because I didn’t have another partner. Right away I started volunteering in the news department at KBOO-FM, and in short order I became a news anchor. Despite the great new job, I was still so crushed over my break-up that I would chain-smoke cigarettes and stay up late, pondering why he left, and how crappy I felt over it.
Late one evening I happened to watch The Mary Tyler Moore Show on Nick at Nite, and I felt a gleam of hope. Mary worked in a news department, just like me. The opening credits showed her walking in the park, washing her car, shopping at the grocery store, and finally tossing her hat up into the air joyously because she was going to make it after all. I started to live for eleven PM to watch Mary. She was able to enjoy home-cooked meals for herself, shake her head at man-crazy Rhoda, and basically just be okay alone. She was inspiring and comforting, and she made me feel that I would be okay after all, too. For about a month I didn’t miss an episode, and then one day I said goodbye to her. I even sent her a letter to tell her that she helped me get over my heartbreak, and I thanked her sincerely. I never heard back, but can you really blame her?
“Bill just looked at me and said he’d never seen the show. Can you say stick in the mud? Bill was duller than watching paint dry.”
“Well, Liz...” I can hear the wind up in my father’s voice. He is ready to deliver one of his famous insights, and he never fails in his timing.
“I guess if you read a lot of books, you’re considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you’re not considered well-viewed.”