IN a themed dinner recently, I watched a lady sitting alone across the table where I sat gingerly cut a steak.
Judging from the way her eyebrow was raised slightly higher than the other and how she sliced the meat against the grain, she was probably thinking by now—and we hadn’t had the chance to talk yet!—that I was the kind of man who sleeps with half of the number of women he sees.
I cleared my throat, then ventured: “Are you letting the world end just like that?”
She looked up from her plate, her face tinged in day-glow orange, lifted her glass to her lips, sipped and said: “I’m sorry?”
“What if the world were to end tomorrow” was the theme of the dinner event; and the host obviously wanted to create a moment.
More than an assembly of bright minds to talk about the legacies they’d leave at their wake, the hypothetical final meal was a gathering of strangers, randomly seated in tables for two, to induce meaningful conversations upon them.
Here’s what I learned:
1. The hardest thing about talking to a stranger is that there’s nothing to talk about. But that’s the beauty of it.
My first thought was that I might have seen my random dinner date, Wendy, from a TV show when I was briefed earlier that she was, well, a TV show host and a model—with a movement. It must be a show slated in the dead of night, when one’s either asleep or still counting sheep.
While food is a universal experience and might be common ground, as the late American chef James Andrew Beard said, I latched on to what’s readily obvious and familiar: “Are you letting the world end just like that?”
As it turned out, the question, to Wendy, didn’t fall on the supposed thematically hypothetical context. She revealed that she was dumped by her boyfriend the night before. I thought maybe because of that, she sees every guy, including me, as a dick and the effort I made to talk to her a standard dick move.
While others in that room talked about changing the world, flying to Mars in banana space suits and waxing poetic about what could they have been in a parallel universe, Wendy and I talked about her boyfriend. At least now she’s talking.
2. Ask questions of a stranger like you’re old friends catching up.
“You ever had sex?” I asked. Wendy said yes but only at the outset of the relationship.
“Toward the end we barely did it. How could we; we hardly even ‘talked,’ or, if we did, we only talked over the phone,” she said.
“And in the off-chance you got together?
“He’s on his phone a lot. What’s the point of being together if you’d rather talk to someone else?”
I forked salami into my mouth.
“We broke up because there’s nothing to talk about anymore.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t know what to say.
Then she asked if I had regrets.
My thoughts turned to the time I was once smitten by a lovely lady to whom I offered a seat beside me on a bus.
All the time I wanted to start a conversation, she was grinning. Maybe she knew I was stumped for words; maybe she wanted to talk, too.
“I wish I had asked for her name,” I told Wendy. “I wish I told her how hard it is to be a man. I wish that maybe, just maybe, she felt how equally hard it was on her part as a woman that I kept her waiting.”
3. If you can’t get her number, dance or do something memorable
“Looks aren’t everything,” Wendy said. “Believe me, I’m a celebrity.”
“So that’s what you take up the cudgels for?”
“And women’s rights.”
“Edify me,” I leaned toward her. “What’s your idea of a gentleman?”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
I told Wendy that my idea of a gentleman, if I were a she, would not be someone who goes ahead to open the door or feels the need to spoon-feed me on our dinner date. I may not be as strong as he is, but it’s not as if he is someone to whom any feminazi taking up the cudgels for woman empowerment can play damsel in distress when she cannot open a bottle of ketchup.
“A gentleman makes his woman feel she’s a lady, not a person with disability,” I said. “So let me teeter-totter in my Louboutin down a flight of stairs, not asking him to hold anything for me, except my hand.”
She laughed.
I took Wendy’s hand and asked her for a dance as Postmodern Jukebox crooned that there’s neither time nor place for us.
It was ironic: Tomorrow the world would end; but the songstress was mooning about forever.
Editor’s note: Vernon Velasco, a former staff of the BusinessMirror, is a regular contributor to the newspaper’s Y2Z section. The views expressed by Velasco do not reflect those of the BusinessMirror’s.
