That Familiar Ring

I find marriage preferable to dating. If I could pinpoint one experience that tipped the scales it would be the time I dated Sophie.

We met on a dating site. I had just about given up on whole internet dating after five dates with women who posted pics of themselves from high school, when they weren't seventy pounds overweight. Sophie emailed me and we set up a date for the following night. She was thin, pretty, with long curly locks of jet black hair. We hit it off so I decided to take her somewhere fancy for dinner. The conversation flowed, but with each successive wine, red flag number one (ultimately ignored) waved in my face. The more she drank, the more shifty eyed she became. By the end of dinner it looked as though she was watching a tennis match the way her eyes moved pendulous in their sockets.

The next red flag waved at me the first night we spent together. It was ten o'clock and she said, "If you want to have sex we better hurry, I just took my psych meds and they make me very sleepy." She nodded out in the middle of foreplay. I should have cut my loses then and there, but I'm male.

Rather than listen to the nagging voice in my head assuring me this could only get worse, I invited Sophie to my cousin's wedding. It was more about putting on airs since all my cousins were star athletes, married to pretty girls. Sophie was my trophy.

During the rehearsal dinner, Sophie ordered drinks as if Prohibition would be reinstated at midnight. By the end of dinner she was slouched in her seat, eyes darting to and fro so I feigned a stomach ache and got us out of there. Crisis averted? Crisis postponed.

Since no booze would be served at the church, I felt safe. Sophie looked amazing in the dress I bought her. She was sociable and impressed me to the point that I decided it might be ok if she had a drink or two at the reception. In all the grandeur, I lost track of how much she had. Walking out of the bathroom she ran up to me shouting, "The DJ said I could sing, I'm gonna sing!" and zipped off before I could catch her.

By the time I made it back into the hall the DJ was announcing her, "And now, to sing for the bride and groom, Sophie!"

The thump of It's Raining Men started. I scanned the room but found only the piercing stare of my 80 year old grandmother. I moved out of her direct line of fire and took a seat to wait it out.

"Humidity is rising," she sang, "Barometer's getting low. According to all sources, the streets the place to go..."

Confined to the stage, it seemed that I'd only have to live down a modicum of embarrassment, until, "Tonight for the first time, just about half past ten, for the first time in history, it's gonna start raining men..." She left the stage and started slinking around the room provocatively. The wave of horror passed, the crowd clapped to the beat, and the wedding party was into it.

It was at, "God bless Mother Nature, she's a woman too. She took off to heaven and she did what she had to do," that she approached my uncle, the father of the groom, and proceeded to give him a lap dance during the chorus, "It's raining men, Hallelujah!"

My head had reached the table by then, my face seven different shades of red when I heard the youngest of my cousins yell, "Yo Bry."

I ignored him.

"Hey, Bry!" he called again.

I looked over.

"Why's your girlfriend so shy?"