Many years ago, not long after graduate school, I once went out with this girl -- let's call her Lisa -- whom I got to know through a show I had at the Simard & Halm Gallery on Melrose Avenue (it's long gone now).
She was the daughter of a well-to-do German lady who was supposedly of noble(!) heritage (they still have those in Europe, at least nominally). The mother had asked the curators for an interview with the artist, probably expecting the artist to be a mature man of Christian/European extraction, based on the subject matter and style of some of the paintings in the show, and the fact that my last name, Suhr, looks German. So if that were the case, mother and daughter must have been surprised to see a young Asian guy show up, but maybe they were all the more intrigued by the unexpectedness of it, and anyway they were super nice to me; and as things worked out, the daughter was about my age and single, so we ended up going out.
We started out with a movie date. And although I can't recall what our original selection was at the time, for some reason we ended up going to see "Eddie Murphy Delirious" instead, a performance documentary of Eddie's stage routines. Well, if you know anything about Eddie Murphy's standup, you know it's gonna be full of all sorts of expletives casually thrown about, and forbidden lines crossed and recrossed, all in good humor. Good luck^^
The movie had been released quite recently, but it had quickly developed something of a reputation for its riotous full-bore-ahead, anything-for-comedy style; so poor elegant Lisa, you can fairly well imagine her shock... To be sure, I myself hadn't expected anything quite so wild either, but still, I wasn't offended at all and anyway it was all very funny. But afterward when we came out, all Lisa said was "That was not a movie" -- presumably meaning that she'd found it vulgar and offensive, not at all like the classy films she was used to, and she was not at all entertained by it. I was maybe a tiny bit annoyed by her reaction to what I'd found simply hilarious, but anyway that certainly didn't keep me from "parking" on the way back to her house. We talked a while, then we started "necking" (do people even still use that term any more? it was old-fashioned even back then) in the car -- until we were interrupted by a policeman who thought we were suspicious (this was in a ritzy area of L.A.).
Well, soon after that first date I had an opportunity to attend a "lecture and simultaneous magic show" given by this psychiatrist in his Bel-Air home; it seems he was a well-known personality in the local L.A. chapter of Mensa. Imagine my surprise when I saw Lisa and her mom there -- turned out, Lisa was a Mensan (as was I). Long story short, I was already having second thoughts about Lisa, and I had gone to the meeting with this other girl from my job who I thought I might have better luck with (not to mention more in common with). Her name was Melanie.., or maybe it was Melody... Anyway, so I sat us to the front of Lisa and mom, and all throughout the psychiatrist/magician's presentation made a show of being real close with Mel. And it worked. Lisa dropped me forthwith, and I was free.
At the time I felt pretty proud of myself, thinking I'd gotten away with something really cool, having manipulated Lisa into "voluntarily" doing something I wanted her to do, even as she thought it was what she wanted to do -- you might even say it was a bit like a plot device from some convoluted K-drama romcom (and this long before anyone had ever heard of K-dramas); but that was then, and now I'm feeling pretty s̶h̶i̶t̶t̶y̶ guilty about it. It reminds me of the proud Monkey King, Son O-gong (Ch. Sun Wukong), the central character from the classic Chinese novel Journey to the West, who flew on a cloud to the edge of the world and back, and thought he'd won a bet with the Buddha, only to realize he'd only been spinning around in the palm of the Buddha's hand.
But still, I can't help it -- now and then I catch myself imagining the seismic shift the course my life might have undergone, if I'd managed to successfully court Lisa and married into German nobility!
To be honest, I'd very probably be long since divorced, due to "irreconcilable personal differences". It's just obvious. But would I then have been able to keep whatever aristocratic title I might have acquired from the marriage? Probably not.
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