It’s been a long time since I went out on a date with somebody new, but boy, I’ll tell you. I kissed a lot of frogs before I found a prince. That was a famous line and it’s true. Oh, so many times I wanted to swear off dating, and I did for a while because I figured I had been through enough. I decided if I found somebody, good, and if I didn’t, I would just do something else on the weekends. I wasn’t going out on dates.
And then, while I was doing that I decided to be — I was part of the old Residence Hall Advisory Board. And so we had a dance at our dorm, and we invited different people from different places to come, and this one guy that I knew came and brought the guy from down the hall from him. And while we were there, and I was in charge of the room where we were having everything, this guy threw up. It’s what happened back in the old days when they used to serve garbage can punch in the 70s. Oh, that stuff was awful. Anyway, he threw up and I had to go and find the janitor’s closet and the mop bucket and all that good stuff, and this guy shows up and he says to me, “If you will dance with me afterwards, I will clean up this mess. This guy that threw up was my roommate and I feel kind of bad about it. So, if you’ll dance with me, I’ll clean it up.” I wasn’t going to turn that down. I didn’t care what this guy looked like or who he was, I wasn’t gonna clean up this other guy’s barf. So he cleaned it up and I danced with him.
He was a horrible dancer. He was just a horrible dancer. He seemed like kind of a nice guy, but he was a horrible dancer. And I didn’t know what his name was. I didn’t really pay any attention to him, and afterwards he kinda disappeared. I think he took his roommate home, and I didn’t see him again. Later the next week, I had been at a meeting — another RHA meeting, where we had been sitting for a long time and I had been drinking pitchers of Coca-Cola and I really — when I got back to the dorm, I really needed to go to the bathroom, but I came down the hall. And of course in those days, the phones were attached to the wall in your dorm room. And my phone was ringing and I answered the phone and I says, “Hey, uh, I don’t know who you are, but I gotta go to the bathroom and I’ll be right back. And either that, or call me back,” and I just dropped the phone and ran.
Went to the bathroom, came back thinking that I’m gonna pick up the phone and it’s gonna be dead, and whoever it is, I’ll call later. And I picked up the phone, I said, “Hello?” and the person — or, the voice on the other end said, “Hello.” And I went, “Oh, you’re still here?” And he says, “Well, yeah, you said you’d be right back.” And I’m like, “Okay.” So I sat down on the floor and started talking to this guy. And he just seemed very nice. He told me that he was the guy that had cleaned up the barf from the dance and that I danced with him and so forth and so on, and he told me his name and, you know, a few other things, and then after a while he asked me if I’d go out with him on Saturday night, if I’d like to go to the Planetarium. ‘cause they had a cool show, and would I like to go to the Planetarium with him. Like, okay, seems nice enough. I wasn’t doing anything.
So I went to the Planetarium with him. It was very nice, but I had no idea what he looked like and I couldn’t remember his name. I was talking to one of the girls down the hall and she said, “All right. I’ll tell you what.” She said, “I’ll go downstairs and see well, you know, if I can see him when he calls and says he’s coming in — he’s coming for you.” She says, “See if I can pick him out.” She said, “I saw him, I think I’ll remember what he looks like.” And she said, “I can tell you if he looks like a nice guy or not.”
So she called me from downstairs, because he had to walk up the stairs, and she said, “He looks good.” And I went, “Okay.” So I went out with him, and I ended up of course, like, two years later marrying him, and I’m still married to him and it’s been almost 48 years, but yeah, and that’s all because I decided I wasn’t going on another date. I had been on enough dates, and I had dated enough frogs, so.