Oh Boy, Oh Boy, Oh Boy!

I do not think the word “courting” is used enough anymore. It sounds old fashion, proper, and desperate. But courting is exactly what I was doing when I started dating Sarah.

I first met Sarah at a Macalester College swimming meeting with our athletic director Ken Andrews. The meeting was required by the NCAA to inform the athletes of the recruiting penalties. The irony of this meeting is that Macalester’s swim team consists of eight guys and maybe ten girls. To suggest Macalester was violating recruiting rules was like accusing Paul Wellstone of being a Texas Republican. Traditionally at these meetings, we would torment Ken. One year, just after the movie “A Fish Called Wanda” came out, Greg Young kept saying “K…K…Ken is c…c…coming to k…k…kill me!”.

Sarah came late with another freshman that we later gave the moniker “Eric The Lush”. I later learned that Sarah and Eric were at a party and were not going to swim but after a few decided to give it a try. She came into the meeting made me slide over and sat next to me. I was smitten from then on.

When we actually tried to start dating we were met with endless roadblocks. Every date we had was a disaster. Our first date was to Mac Cinema. Stan, my roommate, suggested we go see “Freaks”. It was good, he insisted, or maybe he had just heard it was. It was the worse movie I had ever seen. It was literally a movie with circus freaks. There was a bearded lady, pen-heads, flipper boy, etc. Sarah and I had nothing to say to each other after the movie. We were stunned.

Our next fiasco was “Clockwork Orange”. This could have been ok if I had not been sloppy drunk. I remember Eric The Lush passing me a bottle of beer, dropping it, asking for another, dropping it, etc. Sometime during the movie I had to leave to relieve myself and I can not remember if I lost my way back to the movie or it I just decided to go home but the next thing I knew, I woke up with a terrible headache.

Both Sarah and I liked each other but we both felt that our experiment was about to come to an end. My friend JT suggested a movie “The Adventures of Barron Munchausen”. He had not seen it but thought it looked interesting. In a last gasp desperate attempt to see if the Cauthorn/Smith union could work, we left on our date.

I was so nervous. I knew that this could be my last chance to woo Sarah, to make up for my first impressions. It had to something special.

I was wrong. It did not have to be special; it only needed to be fair. “The Adventures of Barron Munchausen” was reasonably good but as I sat next to Sarah and could tell by her reactions that she was not repulsed, I laughed. I laughed so hard that it made Sarah chuckle. I laughed with such relief that when Eric Idle started running for the first time, tears were coming down my face.

Most importantly, Sarah was now laughing too.

Lyle Lovett sings a song “Fat Babies” where he says; “I like you because you like me and you don’t like much”. That night I knew that I liked Sarah and “The Adventures of Barron Munchausen” for giving me a chance to continue to court Sarah. I have not seen “The Adventures of Barron Munchausen” sense and I do not know if I will, but I will always remember that night, holding Sarah’s hand thinking I still had a chance.