Pickup Lines that Led to Marriage?

[howard lee]

Married people: Do you remember the first thing or thereabouts you said to entice the person who would eventually become your spouse?

I'll start. 

"I understand you met my mom at Marie's memorial service the other day. Would you like to have dinner with me sometime?"

[Shannon]

I don't remember the first thing I said, but I remember the first thing I thought.

I was playing guitar and leading some music for an on-campus religious organization. I saw her as she walked into the chapel with some guy she had met at freshman orientation. My exact thought: "Hey, she's cute. Who's the dork with her?"

[Marshall]

She picked me up on a bar. I remember we were comparing who had the biggest mouth and the longest arms.

She was drinking White Russians.

[drlj]

We shared a jail cell in Waco. I was in for vagrancy and she had beaten somebody senseless at Ignatio’s Tanqueria the night before.
The screws brought us our morning trays of breakfast slop and, while we ate, we talked about hooking up in a life a crime.
“We get outa here, sistah, and we should head north. Establish new identities. Settle down in some IL small town and quietly make ourselves rich in the embezzlement game.”
“I ain’t got no plans. Sounds good to me.”
So, they sprung us that afternoon. We stole a DeSoto we saw parked outside the bank and we headed out. We ditched the DeSoto in KY and hot-wired a Plymouth. That took us the rest of the way to Beecher, IL where we dumped the Plymouth. We had a sack of money from my last scam. We bought a house, changed our names, falsified teacher licenses and went to work so we could launder the money our scams brought in. It’s been bliss ever since.
Our real names don’t matter. The past we invented is all you need to know.
Don’t quote me. I will deny it.

[Russell Letson]

I was introduced to Cezarija at an annual departmental meet-the-new-people reception in 1967--she was one of the new grad students and I was a second-year oldster. She doesn't remember that, but I do. The introducer was the professor who three years later would later go from being my mentor to trying to get me drafted. She recalls us meeting in Old English class that term, taught by that same mentor/traitor. But we got fully acquainted when I provided a Christmas-break ride home for her and two other Pittsburghers. It was a long drive from Carbondale to Pittsburgh back in 1967 (the interstates were not quite finished), and we had a lot of time to talk. By the time I got home, I had a pretty good idea of where I wanted to end up. It took a bit longer for C. come to the same conclusion, but by 1970, everybody we knew (including our parents) was saying, "So when are you two going to get married?" So we did, just to shut them up.

(And then the draft notice came, and I filed for CO status, and my mentor sent a letter to my draft board suggesting I be inducted, and we parted company academically, and he tried to fail me out of the doctoral program, and I changed my dissertation area from medieval to science fiction and fantasy and finished anyway, and here we are. We're still married and my ex-mentor, I find, has been dead since 1998.)

[aquaduct]

I was working as a Respiratory Therapist in a hospital and I got on an elevator and the most beautiful young lady I've ever seen rolled a patient's wheelchair onto the same elevator. I was speechless for the whole ride.

Then I went down to the office and asked the only other male RT on the entire staff if he knew who she was and he didn't.

So I stalked her. Took a few weeks of walking around the hospital until I saw her and then checking that against the rack of time cards in the basement to figure out her name.

Then one evening I happened to see her rolling a gurney with a dead body down to the morgue and she seemed a bit upset. So I stopped to chat with her a bit and then offered to take her out to eat after the shift.

That was 41 years ago and we just celebrated our 37th anniversary back in March.

Yes, she did marry her stalker.

[billhammond]

"Sure, I'll give you 20 bucks for bus fare."

[drlj]

May 3, 2024 11:28:22 GMT -5 Russell Letson said:

I was introduced to Cezarija at an annual departmental meet-the-new-people reception in 1967--she was one of the new grad students and I was a second-year oldster. She doesn't remember that, but I do. The introducer was the professor who three years later would later go from being my mentor to trying to get me drafted. She recalls us meeting in Old English class that term, taught by that same mentor/traitor. But we got fully acquainted when I provided a Christmas-break ride home for her and two other Pittsburghers. It was a long drive from Carbondale to Pittsburgh back in 1967 (the interstates were not quite finished), and we had a lot of time to talk. By the time I got home, I had a pretty good idea of where I wanted to end up. It took a bit longer for C. come to the same conclusion, but by 1970, everybody we knew (including our parents) was saying, "So when are you two going to get married?" So we did, just to shut them up.

(And then the draft notice came, and I filed for CO status, and my mentor sent a letter to my draft board suggesting I be inducted, and we parted company academically, and he tried to fail me out of the doctoral program, and I changed my dissertation area from medieval to science fiction and fantasy and finished anyway, and here we are. We're still married and my ex-mentor, I find, has been dead since 1998.)

Just curious, but was your mentor/traitor trying to get rid of you because he had eyes for your sweetie or was the mentor/traitor just a despicable cad?

[Rob Hanesworth]

Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?

[Russell Letson]

LJ: As far as any of us could figure, he was a deeply closeted or perhaps unconscious homosexual--lifelong bachelor with a prayer kneeler in his home library. (Praying for what, I recall wondering when I saw it.) Word was that he never gave a woman student an A--until Cezarija. He also was said to have undercut or driven away every one of his potential mentees. So I doubt that he had the hots for C, or any woman. His acolytes were all men. And he bullied a student of C's that she had sent to Carbondale for grad school to the point that she went to Carnegie-Mellon for her Ph.D.

The only dissertation I knew him to have overseen to completion was by a friend ours, a gifted artist and scholar, whose project was an original faux Old English poem. Rainbow (the prof's actual name) gave the go-ahead on it, with the proviso that the poem be treated in full academic-edition manner, with a scholarly introduction and full linguistic impedimenta, meaning a glossary including every word and its grammatical function, just like the Klaeber Beowulf edition. I somehow came across one of the file copies of the finished dissertation, and Jerry had done it up in style. But then, reproducing ancient artifacts was one of his hobbies--he painted the ikonstasis for a local Orthodox church and, for fun, painted a historically-correct Renaissance fresco on another friend's apartment wall. He gave me a tiny practice study for a saint and a Madonna, both with gold-leaf backgrounds, and (for my mother) I commissioned a Byzantine-style Christ (can't recall whether it was a Sacred Heart or a Pantocator--my brother has it now). He also designed the wrap-around dust cover for John Gardner's Life and Times of Chaucer. The figure at the bottom holding a paintbrush is a self-portrait, while John looks out from the middle window on the left.



To be fair to Rainbow, he was completely competent and a more-than-decent teacher in his area of medieval linguistics, if a bit stuffily old-fashioned on the literary end--he did not at all resonate with John Gardner's big-tent sensibility. And I think that once he saw me as one of John's students, he soured on me.

[Shannon]

Marshall probably thought this thread was about L.R. Baggs or Fishman or something like that.

[epaul]

May 3, 2024 13:28:41 GMT -5 Russell Letson said:

... He also designed the wrap-around dust cover for John Gardner's Life and Times of Chaucer. The figure at the bottom holding a paintbrush is a self-portrait, while John looks out from the middle window on the left.

Is that John Gardner as in the author of "Grendel" John Gardner?

[Marshall]

May 3, 2024 14:06:40 GMT -5 Shannon said:

Marshall probably thought this thread was about L.R. Baggs or Fishman or something like that.

Ha ha. Touché.

[epaul]

Charlene took a post-college job as the educational/activities director of the Pine to Prairie chapter of the Audubon Society (we managed a 600 acre wildlife preserve). I was the editor of the "Snowy Owl", the chapter's award-winning and nationally acclaimed newsletter. I interviewed Charlene for the newsletter. I brought my golden retriever, Woody, along with me. Woody won the day. I came with the dog.

[Russell Letson]

May 3, 2024 14:20:29 GMT -5 epaul said:

Is that John Gardner as in the author of "Grendel" John Gardner?

Yup. He would have become my dissertation director if he hadn't gone off to become a Famous Author.

[Cosmic Wonder]

I met Anita and her sister at a wine tasting when I first moved to Portland, They were sitting across the table from me. At some point during the festivities, Anita said something, and I laughed so hard wine came out my nose. I decided after that that this girl was someone I shoukd get to know.

Mike

[david]

Mike,

Wine coming out of your nose is a good sign.

Like Shannon, I do not remember a specific line but I had a similar thought, "Hey, she's cute. Why is she with that dork?" The dork was my roommate's friend. A couple weeks later I ran into her again in a college ski class and asked her out. That was 1977 and we have been together ever since.

[billhammond]

May 3, 2024 18:10:58 GMT -5 david said:

Wine coming out of your nose is a good sign.

Not if you're alone, though. Then it's just a sign of bad wine.

[Marty]

May 3, 2024 10:22:41 GMT -5 drlj said:

We shared a jail cell in Waco. I was in for vagrancy and she had beaten somebody senseless at Ignatio’s Tanqueria the night before.
The screws brought us our morning trays of breakfast slop and, while we ate, we talked about hooking up in a life a crime.
“We get outa here, sistah, and we should head north. Establish new identities. Settle down in some IL small town and quietly make ourselves rich in the embezzlement game.”
“I ain’t got no plans. Sounds good to me.”
So, they sprung us that afternoon. We stole a DeSoto we saw parked outside the bank and we headed out. We ditched the DeSoto in KY and hot-wired a Plymouth. That took us the rest of the way to Beecher, IL where we dumped the Plymouth. We had a sack of money from my last scam. We bought a house, changed our names, falsified teacher licenses and went to work so we could launder the money our scams brought in. It’s been bliss ever since.
Our real names don’t matter. The past we invented is all you need to know.
Don’t quote me. I will deny it.

As I've said many times. Don't believe a word that comes from this man's mouth. I happen to know it was Not Waco but Ciudad Juarez.

[drlj]

May 3, 2024 19:18:44 GMT -5 Marty said:

May 3, 2024 10:22:41 GMT -5 drlj said:

We shared a jail cell in Waco. I was in for vagrancy and she had beaten somebody senseless at Ignatio’s Tanqueria the night before.
The screws brought us our morning trays of breakfast slop and, while we ate, we talked about hooking up in a life a crime.
“We get outa here, sistah, and we should head north. Establish new identities. Settle down in some IL small town and quietly make ourselves rich in the embezzlement game.”
“I ain’t got no plans. Sounds good to me.”
So, they sprung us that afternoon. We stole a DeSoto we saw parked outside the bank and we headed out. We ditched the DeSoto in KY and hot-wired a Plymouth. That took us the rest of the way to Beecher, IL where we dumped the Plymouth. We had a sack of money from my last scam. We bought a house, changed our names, falsified teacher licenses and went to work so we could launder the money our scams brought in. It’s been bliss ever since.
Our real names don’t matter. The past we invented is all you need to know.
Don’t quote me. I will deny it.

As I've said many times. Don't believe a word that comes from this man's mouth. I happen to know it was Not Waco but Ciudad Juarez.

Waco, Juarez. Who keeps track of these things?