May 2009

..on this date, May 19th, I asked her out.

She was working three jobs in those days. That sounds like a lot, but two were only a few hours a week – the main one, at a video store, was almost full-time and that’s where we’d met.

I’d just moved up from San Diego to take a job at a local radio station in central California. I didn’t know anyone aside from a few coworkers at the station who I’d become acquainted with in the scant week that I’d been there. So when I signed up for a membership at the little mom-and-pop video store on the corner, I got kind of chatty with the girl who worked there. She was delightful, and we had the same taste in movies.

Andy was a buddy in a neighboring town who I’d worked with at a Sacramento radio station a few years prior to all of this. Yeah, I got around in those days. Anyway, he’s the one who got me the job in this little town. Well, he’d told me about the opening and I applied, so in a way he got me the job but not really. He did mornings at a country station in Visalia.

He called me up on this date – May 19th – during his morning gig and asked if I wanted to join he and his wife at a potluck dinner later that evening. I was working the morning shift at my new station and accepted the invite. Problem was, he’d said “bring a date.” I got off at two – how in the hell was I supposed to get someone to go with me on this short of notice?

I thought of the station receptionist, Cindy – blech. SO not my type. The station office manager, Donna, was married and too old anyway. My GOD, she must have been at least forty two! My new pal, Larry, was working that evening.. he was the one coming in to take over for me. That was about it, except for a waitress named Jill who I’d met at the coffee shop. She’d been the first person I talked too when I moved into town, a couple of days before starting the new job. Cute girl, but I didn’t have a clue how to get a hold of her and the coffee shop certainly wouldn’t give me her number if I called down there. Maybe I could leave a message..

Oh, wait.. the video store girl.. what was her name?

Dorian.

Well, she wouldn’t be at the video store this time of day, so maybe she’s at job #2, which is a woman’s clothing store downtown. I broke out the phonebook, looked it up, dialed, and asked for her when the lady who owned the store answered.

“I’m sorry, but she’s not working here today.”

“Oh shoot, it was kind of urgent.”

“Well if it’s urgent I could take your number and run it over to the yogurt shop.. that’s where she is on Fridays.”

Welcome to small town life.

Job #3, the yogurt shop, was half a block from job#2, the clothing store. I didn’t know about job #3 and only knew about the clothing store because she’d mentioned it while I was renting a movie from her at job#1, the video store, a few days earlier.

The clothing store lady ran into the yogurt store and handed her a slip of paper. “A young man called for you, I don’t know who it was.” As Dorian tells it, she was puzzled.. she didn’t recognize the number but thought she might as well return the call since she was between customers at the moment.

In the yogurt shop there was  a radio on the shelf that was always tuned to a certain local radio station – the one I’d gone to work for. Dorian didn’t know that the number she’d just dialed was to the station, so when Cindy the receptionist answered with the station’s call-letters, it took her by suprise. Especially since she heard my voice – IN THAT EXACT MOMENT – say those call-letters on the radio on the shelf.

Puzzled beyond all reason, Dorian asked if someone from that station had called for her. Cindy put her on hold and paged me in the studio, but she didn’t get an answer. I’d gone into the break room so she took Dorian off hold and told her no one had called for her. A part of Cindy not being my type is that she did things like that – she was too lazy to go look for me, so she tried to get rid of the caller. Dorian insisted that someone had called for her, so Cindy managed to get off her butt and brave the twenty-foot journey into the breakroom, where she found me making coffee.

“Were you expecting a call from someone named Dorian?”

Heck yeah, I was. I returned to the studio and picked up the phone. I told her I was one of the new customers at the video store – the one who liked musicals. She knew who I was. I told her about my friend who’d gotten me the job at the radio station and how he’d asked if I wanted to bring a date to a potluck dinner in Visalia that evening, and would she like to be the date?

She thought it over for a few seconds.

She would.

I picked her up at about six-thirty and we arrived in Visalia at seven.

The rest is history.

I proposed to her on the air about eight months later, with my country station pal, Andy, present in the studio with me. We were married on June 2nd of 1990.

When I hit PUBLISH on this post it’ll be exactly twenty years ago – California time -  that I was between the return call from the yogurt shop and picking her up at six-thirty. Did I know I’d be posting an account of this on the Internet in exactly twenty years to the day?

No.. what’s “the Internet?”

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