Adventures of a Salsa Goddess Read Online Free PDF

chinless men with guts that could qualify for their own zip codes look in the mirror and think “stud” before going out to try and pick up a woman half their age.
    “Great apartment!” Lessie said, stepping out onto the balcony. “What a view!” She turned and flashed me a huge smile. “So, Sam, you were all mysterious on the phone about why you’re in Milwaukee. What’s up?” she asked me, her blue eyes expectant. “You’re on assignment, aren’t you?”
    I handed Lessie a copy of the May 27 issue of Tres Chic with a silhouette of a woman’s head on the cover carrying the lead story: “Will Our Mystery Woman Defy the Statistics and Find Mr. Right?”
    “Holy shit, are you the Mystery Woman?” she asked, gaping at me as though I’d just announced the date for my sex change operation. “I heard something about this on the news yesterday.”
    I shrugged. “I’ll tell you the whole story over dinner.”
    * * *
    “So this whole thing isn’t just a publicity stunt for Tres Chic ?” Lessie asked me a half hour later. She stabbed a forkful of greens with her right hand while she grabbed a French fry off my plate with her left, swiped it through the ketchup, and popped it into her mouth. “You’re not going to get a quiet annulment a few months after everything dies down?”
    “No scam. I’m here to find true love,” I said. I cut another slice of my filet mignon, taking full advantage of my healthy expense account. “And my wedding is already set for this New Year’s Eve at the Plaza.”
    I had also finagled a three-week honeymoon to Europe from Elaine once I realized I had some leverage. Unless Elaine wanted to go with a freelance writer, and I knew that for this type of assignment she preferred to keep it in-house, I was the only choice, being the only woman over forty and never married presently working at Tres Chic .
    “Wow, this is just like those reality TV shows, only I guess it’s reality magazine?”
    It was real enough I suppose, although nothing before in my life had ever had such a bizarre, surreal quality to it. It was difficult to grasp the concept that it was now my “job” to find a husband, something I’d thought I wanted since I was a teenager, except that now I was no longer sure.
    “You’ve picked a hell of a city to try and find a husband,” Lessie continued, shaking her head. “I know that’s why you were sent here, but...”
    “Is it that bad?” I asked her.
    “The first words that spr ing to mind when I think of Milwaukee’s dating scene are black, soulless wasteland of loneliness and despair ,” she said in a voice, serious soft, like a mother explaining that the hamster isn’t sleeping, it’s dead.
    My face must’ve collapsed at that point, since she immediately broke out into a huge grin. One of the things I’d always loved about Lessie was her wicked sense of humor, which was so disarming and unexpected coming from someone who’d grown up on a dairy farm in the middle of Minnesota. At least she used to look wholesome. Her sense of humor fit her new looks perfectly.
    “The problem is that we have an epidemic of un-dating,” she said.
    “Un-dating?”
    “You know, men who don’t really ask you out. They suggest meeting them at a bar, maybe buy you one drink, and then expect you to jump into bed with them.”
    “Yeah, we have that in New York too. I guess I was hoping the Midwest was a little more traditional,” I said.
    “Or maybe they do ask you out, sort of, but then make the women do all the work,” she said.
    Lessie recounted a story about meeting Kirk at a summer festival the year before. I exchanged my own un-dating experience, telling her about Brad, a wealthy entrepreneur whom I’d met weight lifting at my health club a couple years ago. Our first date had been great, but then he’d followed up with a lame e-mail wanting to know if we were going to have a second “meeting.” I made a mental note to write about un-dating in my journal