Blind Date

I only had one blind date in my life. (I’m assuming at 62 and married I’m not likely to have any other.) I was 18 years old, my first semester in college, Wichita University, most of my friends through high school had gone to the University of Kansas in Lawrence, and a couple of them – Gary and Sally – invited me up to Lawrence for a weekend. Gary’s father (also my doctor) loaned me his Cadillac for the weekend, and I drove it up the Kansas Turnpike at 100 mph (20 over the limit), making the trip in just about two hours. Gary and Sally (not a couple, just two of my best friends) had set me up with a first year student and had purchased tickets for the university production of Othello. The three of us drove to the women’s dorm (there were separate women’s and men’s dorms back then) at the top of the hill, where we met my date, a pleasant, attractive young woman from Texas. There were no implications to the pairings, just some sort of necessary gender parity expected at the time. I hadn’t been to many plays at that time, and I don’t think any Shakespeare, but I found the production engaging, perhaps only because it was one of the first times I’d been out of Wichita on my own, and I was in Lawrence, at the university, a sort of Kansas Shangri-La at the time. After the play, we went to Pizza Hut (that’s about as good as it got for dining in Lawrence then), and it didn’t take long at all before my blind date began her torrid critique of the play – not the writing (it was Shakespeare) or directing or acting or design, but rather the casting – Othello (the Moor) by a black man (“negro” if not “nigger” was the word she used) opposite a white Desdemona. And they kissed. On the mouth. She was nonplussed. She was upset. She was livid. And she didn’t pick up for an instant that Gary and Sally and I were silent, sharing furtive, embarrassed glances, not knowing at all what to do or say, doing and saying nothing. The pizza couldn’t come soon enough. The night couldn’t end soon enough. And that was the whole of my first and only blind date. I can’t know if that was a factor in my eventually being drawn to the theater. Othello did become one of my favorite Shakespeare play. And I did drive back from Lawrence to Wichita at 80 mph. I’ve been wary ever since.