We're collecting your worst date EVER stories and posting them anonymously on this blog. Send your stories to thelisadshow@gmail.com.
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7/21/2010It must have been 1967, but I was home from college and my parents were out of town so I was home alone. A guy called and introduced himself; he was a lawyer, sounded okay, and knew lots of my college friends and also people I'd gone to high school with. So without investigating, I accepted a date.
I got nervous beforehand, so I was sneaking through the den to get to the front of the house where I could watch his arrival and NOT answer the front door if he was creepy when there was a knock on the den door and there he was: a short, balding guy with almost no forehead and a rather unfortunate face. Busted! Hi, how are you? Let's go...
We went to a really nice place for dinner and I was pretty self-conscious because he was a really unattractive man and, typically, I was embarrassed in case someone I knew saw me with this guy. Turns out he didn't really know any of my friends, he just had yearbooks as research, but he was indeed a lawyer, so we talked.
And then when he drove me home, to the back of our big EMPTY house - he thought my folks were home, but no one was - I tried to say Thanks and Good Night when he attacked! I'll never forget his stubby little fingers. I threatened to yell for my parents, I fought him off, my purse dumped its contents everywhere, but I somehow ended up inside alone, sitting in a rocking chair and rocking and crying and totally freaked out.
A few minutes later he called to say he had my lipstick and would come back with it and to apologize and I said NO NO NO and called a boy-type friend who came over with a gun (!) to wait for el creepo who never showed up. I had bruises all over my upper arms. These days I would have called the police, but it was a different era.
He never came back, never contacted me again. Several people said he used the same m.o. with other girls - looking up mutual friends in college annuals and claiming personal connections. A lawyer I knew confirmed that he was nuts. His fingers were really, really stubby, and when I tell this story I always act it out with fingers tucked in to imitate him. And I wonder if he's still practicing law. I think I'll Google him.
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7/20/2010I'd been set up on a date with a San Antonio Police Detective who had come into the television station where I worked.
He took me to Dicks Last Resort on the San Antonio Riverwalk. He was nice enough, but then ordered a bucket o' beers and a bucket o'chicken.
He drank all the beer (12 of them) and spit the gristle from the chicken on the floor - then propositioned the waitress right in front of me.
Haven't dated a cop since.
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Back in my high school days didn't have a car so I would walk and take the bus everywhere I went. anyways my wife (girlfriend at the time) wanted to walk around the park. so the park was like 2 miles away, half way there I need to drop a deuce!! I couldn't hold it at all. so basically dropped a load behind a bush and used my Hanes boxers as a toilet paper! I went commando the whole date :-)
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Linda, a woman a little older than I had come to work in my office, which was the admission office at Alabama's third-largest university. The university was good-sized but the town was small and provincial, very unlike this lady's previous city of residence. Thus, she continually made disparaging remarks about the town, how it was ugly, nothing to do, nowhere decent to eat, etc.
Despite this, I found the woman rather attractive, interesting, alluring--at least partially because she had her Ph.D. and was really brainy. Okay, totally because of that, but I digress. So, one day after listening to her latest rant about our sorry little town, I asked her out. I marched right up to her desk and I said, "Linda, since you think this town is ugly with nowhere decent to eat, I'm going to prove you wrong. Will you go out with me Friday night?"
Her eyes lit up and she flashed a smile I'd never seen. She accepted my date. Her apartment in faculty housing was right around the corner from mine, so I'd pick her up at 7:00. I even borrowed my buddy Todd's 280-Z for the date. I wanted something flashier than my conservative college-admission-officer sedan.
The office set itself abuzz about Van and Linda, Van and Linda.
I put on a new sport coat to pick Linda up. She looked stunning in a flowing skirt and a glittery shawl. She was wearing her hair up, which she knew I liked women to do. She had on a spot more makeup than usual. She looked great, this brainy complainer, and she'd dolled herself up for me. I was right flattered.
Off we went to, in my estimation, Troy, Alabama's best restaurant: the Mossy Grove Schoolhouse. It is housed in an early 1900s schoolhouse, the kind with just a handful couple of classrooms, still very authentic with original wood floors, wavy-glass windows, the whole shebang. I recommended the ribeye. We shared a bottle of champagne. Linda admitted to feeling a mite tipsy. I suggested we go elsewhere for coffee and dessert, after a drive around some of the prettier parts of town.
I took her to the historic districts, whose narrow streets were lined with ancient oaks and homes of Victorian, Antebellum, Greek Revival, English Tudor, and even Art Deco styles. Linda had never seen these neighborhoods and she was impressed. We drove through the quaint downtown area and I pointed out significant churches, banks, department stores, shops, and schools. More impressed with every mile. Then I took her through the Post-War area, past the Baptist Children's Home, and to the most affluent new neighborhood, burgeoning with freshly built European-style mansionettes, all high atop one of Troy's famed seven hills, overlooking the university. I had removed the Z-car's T tops and let the windows down. Linda had let her hair down and the tail of her shawl blew slightly along the windowsill as we cruised along. She looked at me and smiled winsomely, almost whispering, "This is nice." It was a scene out of a movie.
As I entered a cul-de-sac in the tony neighborhood, planning to turn around and continue the tour, Linda suddenly asked me to stop the car. "PLEASE! Just stop the car NOW." She had blanched. Her face had turned the color of her bottle-blonde hair and her bottle-blonde hair had turned back to grey. Her makeup seemed to have removed itself. She yanked her shawl around herself and tensed her whole body almost into a fetal position. Dumbfounded, I stammered, "Linda, what in the world is wrong?" "JUST GET ME OUT OF HERE. NOW!" she ordered me through clenched teeth in a voice I'd not heard since The Exorcist.
I shifted the car into gear and began to roll slowly out of the cul-de-sac. "FASTER!" she growled.
"Linda," I asked more calmly than I really was, "I've been drinking and I don't want to get a ticket. We're not far from your apartment and we'll be there soon."
With that, she grabbed my wrist with a strength that belied her petite self, leaned forward, glared at me with--I swear--red eyes, and growled more deeply than before, "TAKE ME TO THE EMERGENCY ROOM!"
That was sufficient to compel me to turn on the warning flashers and shift through all five speeds of that Z-car in 60 seconds flat, police be damned. I had no idea what was wrong with this she-devil nor what might come out of her body en route to the hospital; I was simply certain that it wasn't going to happen on my watch, in my presence.
I whirled under the porte-cochere at Edge Memorial Hospital and before I could make it to the passenger door to let Linda out, you know, like a gentleman, she was halfway to the ER door. She turned on her heel and waved me away with the tail of her glittery shawl gripped in her hand. Less growly but no less emphatically, she said, "You may go."
I sat there for a few minutes before going home to fix myself a stiff one. I called her the next day to see if she was all right. No answer. Same thing the next day. Of course, I couldn't contain this bizarre story, so I told all my friends about it. Monday morning at the office, Linda came to my door, leaned on the frame, and said somewhat seductively, "Thanks for a lovely evening Friday. You're right: Troy is a beautiful town."
"Well, Linda, you're welcome," I said, "but..."
And before I could muster the vocabulary to ask my inevitable question, she had again given me that "you may go" wave.
Twenty-five years later, I still have no clue what the hell happened that night.
