Old Girlfriends

Sorry I provided no fresh material yesterday. My wife has been gone at our ward girl’s camp, and it’s been up to me to pick up the slack. In addition, the subject matter from my previous post takes a bit more time to fully absorb.

In keeping with my wife’s edict to tell funny stories, I’ve been racking my brains to come up with something, but I’m not as interesting as I thought I was. When we discussed various topics, I kept coming up with stories about old girlfriends, many of which are funny but would probably be inappropriate to revisit now that I’m a happily married dude. For instance, I don’t want to say much about my pre-mission girlfriend who flew up to Salt Lake from LA to ruin my homecoming and dump me upon my return, only to start calling me again after she’d married another guy from my mission. It’s a sad tale, more creepy than funny, and given the effort it took to get her to finally leave me alone, I’d rather not give that woman any indication of my current whereabouts.

Then there’s the story of my first real girlfriend, who I bumped into in a Waldenbooks in Westwood during my senior year at USC, only to discover she’s now a bisexual polygamist. I met her husband and her wife, and personally, I wasn’t attracted to either of them. I tried to appear open-minded about the whole thing, but I’m not that good at hiding my feelings, especially when I’m seriously grossed out. “This shouldn’t be that hard for you to accept,” she said, “given your Mormon background.” Yeah, well, Brigham Young did many things, but as far as I can tell, he never did them with other dudes.

There was the very pretty girl that I dated for awhile until she freaked out after I took her to a Spinal Tap concert at the Universal Amphitheatre. It was actually a church activity; we went with several other couples in the USC Ward. But when I started singing along to “Big Bottom,” complete with lyrics like “Big Bottom/Big Bottom/ Talk about mud flaps/My girl’s got ‘em,” it was the beginning of the end.

I took another girl with a funny last name – if she’d have married me, she would have been able to lose the “Hornbuckle” moniker - to a Bruce Springsteen concert and then, I think, to a movie, but she wasn’t all that keen on me. She was in the ROTC and told me after our second date that she liked “hard men with tight butts.” I didn’t qualify on either score, but in my defense, I didn’t really have much of a butt at the time.

My favorite one to remember, though, probably deserves a post all her own. She’s certainly the loudest girl I’ve ever dated. She was a fellow acting student at USC, and during my sophomore year, she got baptized into the LDS Church by her boyfriend – not me – and the whole thing was done in Chinese, because the boyfriend had served his mission in Taiwan. She decided to speak at her own baptism, and she proceeded to yell at everyone in the room about “taming your sexual urges” and “keeping it in your pants.” It’s that kind of uplifting counsel that the Ensign always seems to overlook.

As the only other LDS acting student, I became something of a mentor to her, accompanying her to the off-campus LDS Institute for instruction on all things theological. She always made those classes... interesting. There was the one where, during a discussion on temple marriage, she interjected that she wanted to “marry a guy who will look at me when he’s ninety years old and still get hard.” Then there was the one where she came to class in short shorts and a jog bra. Good times.

She was never really my girlfriend, although when things went sour with the Chinese-speaking dude, we had a couple of smooching sessions that were plenty of fun. We stayed good friends throughout my USC years, although she drifted away from the church entirely not too long after her baptism. She was working her way through school – a very expensive thing to do at USC tuition prices. She did this by waiting tables at an all-night diner. In the later years of our education, she would arrive at school half asleep, and there was no telling what would come out of her mouth then.

It was in that state that, on one occasion, she decided to come back to church with me. The male sacrament meeting speaker at the pulpit was giving a talk about how children are a blessing from the Lord, and this girl yelled out at the top of her lungs, “Easy for you to say – you don’t have to give birth to ‘em!” It’s the first and last sacrament meeting I’ve attended that’s included a heckler.

In retrospect, it's easy to romanticize the whole dating experience, but the truth is that I vastly prefer being married to dating. In addition, I vastly prefer my wife to any of the girls I dated.