Girlfriend #1: Roz, Part 1

I know. This is what you've been waiting for. It's the good stuff. I hope I don't disappoint, but it ends up being personally disappointing.

Roz was a senior in high school when I was a sophomore. Roz was very thin, had short, black hair and wore glasses. At first, I thought she was Hispanic (because most of the school was Hispanic). It turned out she was an Alaskan native. At the time, she was the closest I was able to get to an Asian chick at the school.

I remember meeting her during the first week of Drama class when she and I were included of a smaller group of other students as we were learning how to improvise. None of us had been in the Drama class before, so we weren't quite aware of what it was we were supposed to accomplish. The teacher gave us a few words that we had to work into a scene. We agonized with how we were supposed to do that. Our group was not the only one having trouble. The teacher really was not very good at explaining many theatrical concepts to us. At the end of the class, we gave up. The teacher said we would try again the next day.

We finally put a scene together, practiced it a couple of times and presented it to the class. I only remember one of the words being "rabbit." Our scene involved a child telling a parent that he had brought home a rabbit as a pet. I was the child and Roz was the parent. Another student was the rabbit. It was really stupid, but not more so than the other groups. Eventually, we would all get better at improvising. (Yes, I do get the irony of practicing an "improvised" scene.)

When I was a sophomore, I always thought that the senior girls were unobtainable. For whatever reason, I got the idea in my head that NONE of the senior girls lived at home with their parents. I don't know why I thought that. It just seemed like they were all mature enough to have their own jobs, their own apartments, that they were grown up and ready to move on with their lives. They weren't going to let some snot-nosed sophomore boy interfere with that. As mentioned earlier, I also thought they all had boyfriends who had left high school a long time ago. However, I never thought the senior boys had obtained these levels of maturity. I knew they all lived with their parents.

As such, I didn't take much notice of Roz during the first few weeks of Drama class. One day, Roz started touching one of the other male students' arms in a rather sensuous way. One of the other girls in the class I was friends with pointed it out and said she was trying to turn him on. I thought to myself that it would be nice if some girl touched me that way.

A few days later, during practice for "Arsenic and Old Lace," Roz and someone she was hanging out with came and sat right next to me in the auditorium. There was no one else around and the auditorium seated 1400 people, so that means she must have really wanted to sit next to me. I pondered the possibility that she might like me that way.

I talked to a "friend" about this. That "friend" then confronted her when she walked by. He asked her if she liked me. She said she didn't know. He then asked he if she was going to homecoming. She didn't know. He then asked her if she wanted to go with me. She said I would have to ask her. So I asked her and she said yes. I never thought I would need a wingman to get dates, but I did then. I should have used a wingman for later on in life, but that opportunity never presented itself.

So, it was official. I had a date to the homecoming dance, and it was with a senior. I was stunned. I didn't know what was going to happen next, but as we find out in tomorrow's article, other people did.