Hot Date Needed: Bobslist Strikes Again

He needed a hot date and posted on Bobslist. I’m a hot date, so I responded.

There’s more to it. He needed a hot date not just for Friday night, not for a booty call, not to “experience this great city with,” but to his class reunion at the University of Michigan’s law school. He offered some perks in return—the new shoes were what did it for me. I’m sure they won’t be the type of shoes I’ll be able to wear anyplace but the back of a limousine, but (say it with me)…

Momma always needs a new pair of shoes.

I haven’t met the guy yet, but I’ve seen his photo. He doesn’t look that bad. In my hometown he’d be considered the catch of all catches—partner in a law firm, single, no freakier-looking than our current President—in fact, much less so. (Although he is 35. To be 35 and single in my hometown would be considered a bit suspect, even for a man.) For a guy like him not to have a date to his class reunion would be damn near impossible in my town—the single secretaries and members of various other of the Women’s Entirely Auxiliary Life Clubs would be sticking to him like white on Wonderbread.

He specified that his date should be “hot.” I told him I didn’t know if I qualified. After all, I’m no stick figure, and I’m more often told I’m fascinating than beautiful (the flowery, mature way of saying “she’s got a great personality”). My red hair and willingness to get slobbering drunk and sing showtunes certainly give me some caché, but I’m not the kind of “hot” girl you’d see running down a beach, balloon tits bouncing in slo-mo. All the same, after seeing my photo (the very one you see before you on this blog), he asked if I’d be adverse to showing some cleavage.

I’m a generous girl. “My cleavage is your cleavage,” I emailed back, thinking how this is all bound to turn out like a Ben Stiller movie, with the dorky, anxious anti-hero coming unhinged on the dance floor at the reunion.

When I meet this guy (we’ll call him Tad), I am going to grill him about why he’s doing this. I have a million theories. He was so busy making partner he hasn’t had a relationship in ten years. Maybe Tad secretly dates the snaggletoothed and slightly mature lady who runs the third floor mail cart around all day, but wants to show off his success with someone who seems to him like a bit more of a trophy. He’s gay and needs a beard (oldest story in the book—so old I thought it was out of print by now). He’s a 35 year-old virgin hoping only slags respond to bobslist adverts. He’s actually a serial killer and has placed the same ad in every city in the country, leaving a trail of would-be-sluts’ guts wherever he goes.

My friend El Zizabeth said she thought he was cute. “Are you kidding?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “He looks smart and maybe funny and really nice.”

All of those things are true. However, I look at many, many photos every day of hot 20 year-olds making sexy mugs for their headshots. I think my taste in men has been redirected entirely toward the younger crowd. The hot, bottle blond, freakily-blue-eyed younger crowd. The crowd with cheekbones like the cliffs of Dover and androgynous beestung lips and camera-oriented charisma.

(My gods, I’m turning into a man. This is the second time in a year I’ve had the crystal realization that a few of the men’s fantasies I’ve spent my life alternately despising and being annoyed by are in truth quite lovely to indulge. From their point of view, that is. Being the object of those fantasies still would give me the willies.)

I think the real truth about Tad is he’s just a nice guy who wants to pretend his life is fulfilling even though he’s a young lawyer who’s never had time to discover his real passions because he’s been working too hard chasing his parents’ Dream of Keeping Up with the Joneses. This "hot date" business is just one more attempt to keep up with the group of Joneses with whom he graduated. Poor Tad.

I’m reminded of high school, when it was my sacred mission to “corrupt” all those around me—corrupting them, to me, meant making them see the world sideways like I did (do), to see life as a playground with room for the holiness of hedonism, not as a path rutted deeply into the ground around the grindstone. Too often we Midwesterners see passion--including the passion for living, the passion for doing what we love--as a sin. I advocate hedonism because around here, people generally need permission to be absolute hedonists before they can allow themselves to feel passionate about anything at all.

Tad seems needful of my kind of corruption.

We’ll see.