Okay, you’ve had a hot date with a sexy — what we used to call ‘together’ — woman, you think this has possibilities. You meet a week later — more of the same. And tonight you’ve got a third meeting set up, you figure this is fish-or-cut-bait time. But now a problem.
“What shirt did I wear?” If I wear that black already-outdated corduroy thing again, will she think I’ve got only two shirts? Or was it the dinner with that other woman where I wore it? Damn, I need a clothes database!
Alternative: I’ll wear a new shirt, one I’ve never worn before, therefore neither she nor anyone else has seen it. Not sure I’m crazy about it, not sure it’s “me,” but what the hell. Don’t remember if I even washed it, what about all the chemicals my wonderful late wife would warn me might be leaching through the pores of my skin? I’ll wash it afterward — now there’s the kind of deal I like!
Okay, almost ready to go, but now a new problem: The shirt has no pockets! I suppose this is supposed to be more sexy, like some woman’s inconvenient dress, it maintains the lines, the somehow faked square shoulders and all that. Who told me to buy this thing? Well, too late to find something else, but where am I going to put my pen, my little notebook, my Post-It-Notes listing the critical things I was supposed to have got done by now? Yeah, not to mention the gas receipts I think I’m supposed to file. Well, to a zip-loc bag into a zippered front compartment of my knapsack. But I was trying not to take the knapsack!
I’ve been guaranteed that the woman who is the target of all these attentions will tell me what a great shirt this is but I know ahead of time that if we run this scene a thousand times that will never happen.
Okay, out the door and drive through the darkness, somehow find the house — the Google Maps app won’t talk to me and finally crashes when I get within few hundred yards. Luckily I remember how to walk up people’s pathways till I can see their house numbers, occasionally illuminated.
It’s a terrific evening with dinner finally at midnight — is it Spain? The shirt, beneath a blue sweater, is forgotten.
*cf. William Goldman’s screenwriting classic, Which Lie Did I Tell?
