I picked up a woman at a movie once.
When I tell this to friends, whether male or female, they almost always respond in amazement, ``How did you ever manage to do that?'' And in fact, I'm pretty proud of the accomplishment myself.
It was at the campus theatre, in Hemenway Hall. They were showing some totally obscure German film. I mean obscure in both senses of the world. Nothing that anybody had ever heard of -- not by Fassbinder or any of the well known German directors -- and also almost totally impossible to make any sense out of.
This woman was there alone, as I was, and she was sitting on the aisle, directly ahead of my own seat. I couldn't even see her that well, but somehow she seemed interesting.
At the end of the film, I leaned forward and said, ``You know, a friend of mine saw `Out of Africa' here and they got the reels in the wrong order. She said that she never did figure out what the movie was about.
``But with this film,'' I continued, ``it probably wouldn't make any difference.''
The woman in front of me was understandably startled by this comment coming from behind her, and asked, ``What did you say?''
To which I repeated my comment.
``Could you explain this movie to me?'' she asked.
``You mean right now?'' I asked, ``Or would you rather that we go somewhere where we could talk?''
So we wound up going to Anna Bannana's together and we talked for quite a bit, although I certainly couldn't begin to explain the movie for her.
We had a rather strange relationship for a few months. She was about forty, I suppose, and owned her own real estate agency. She had been very sexually adventurous when she was young -- something that always attracts me to women. But now, she was concerned about AIDS and was much less active.
She was taking some sort of course on campus -- I think it must have been an introductory philosophy course. She was also reading a number of books -- I remember that one of her enthusiasms was the Jung personality types (the basis for the Meyer-Briggs classification). The world of the intellect was very new and very exciting to her.
Our relationship consisted mostly of her calling me up on the phone and talking non-stop for an hour and a half or two hours about her courses and the books she was reading. I never had any success in getting her to meet and do things together in person.
After awhile, I got pretty bored with her. I guess she had a certain amount of resentment about my loss of interest, but listening to her gush about ideas in philosophy that I had studied in my teens eventually got to be pretty boring. Also, she talked much too loud. I had to hold the phone an inch away from my ear.
March, 1996