A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist's Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl Read Online Free PDF Page B

life—whether at singles’ bars or their collegiate equivalent, club parties—is an exercise in futility. Friends are made, not captured.
    Freshmen should keep that in mind as they pass through the swirl of introductions and forgotten names this week. More than high grades or a superficial social visibility, the friends you make and the experiences you share will give Princeton a meaning and fullness that will remain with you long after academic matters have slipped into the past. [Incredibly enough, this pathetic attempt to rationalize socio-sexual failure turned out to be true.]
    Different adventures yielded different lessons. For freshmen and others who prefer to experience such things vicariously, the following vignettes should suffice.
    You’re your own best transportation. You invite disaster when you must rely upon the good will of other people to meet your transportation needs. Nobody ever wants to leave when you do. Once, to get to a church singles dance, I left my car at the Hicksville train station and patriotically rode the fabled Long Island Rail Road to Carle Place and saved a few precious ounces of gas. Nobody at the dance knew when I could get a train back to Hicksville. A young woman had offered to drive me back, so I didn’t worry. My easy state of mind lasted about as long as the dance did. Gee-whiz, the would-be driver said, as she primly wrung her hands, she couldn’t give me a ride after all, because I was a strange man and her parents wouldn’t want her to give potential weirdos rides at one in the morning. She was adamant, and even an offer to let her examine my press card was to no avail. Finally, after considerable waiting and cursing on a chilly train platform, a member of the clean-up crew took me to my car.
    Quality does not assure compatibility. This is just a rephrasing of the King Midas Dilemma. Why else would I have gotten intensely bored as the only male in a singles group’s post-movie trip to that noted eatery, the Syosset Restaurant? The women—two fairly young, two others better described as “matronly”—were nice enough, but the conversation moved into areas we never explored in Philosophy 200, or even during Freshman Week’s beery confessions. Husbands, ex-husbands, baby-sitters, startling propositions and the ultimate truths contained in the movie Manhattan made me very, very sleepy. My rather obvious foot-tapping was both a signal for somebody to take me to the parking lot where the group had gathered and a means of combating waves of grogginess.
    When opportunity knocks, don’t close the door. If you do, try not to catch your fingers in it. This became apparent one Saturday evening at the Lone Star Café, a Fifth Avenue hangout for visiting oilmen, Gucci cowboys and people who crave Pearl Beer and guacamole dip. While waiting at the bar for two other journalists, a young woman—a teacher—began talking to me. Like a light in the control booth at Three Mile Island the word “contact!” began flashing in my mind. We chatted, but when one of the friends I was expecting arrived, I turned my attention to her and felt no allegiance to the teacher whose acquaintance I had just made. After a while the teacher left. This didn’t really bother me, because two others had replaced her, and social Nirvana, I was sure, was dawning. As it was, I saw neither of these two again, a state of affairs that made me ruefully appreciate the teacher even as memories of the brief encounter faded. [I can still picture the woman sitting with me at the bar. She might have been a lexicographer. Not for the last time did I miss an opportunity. Where is she now?]
    Look for a catharsis. The most effective way of dealing with the feelings of frustration and listlessness that strike everybody at one time or another is to lay them on the table, confront them and then move ahead. Talking with my landlady always helped me. [My landlady in Old Bethpage was a Newsday librarian, and I have fond memories