The Meet Cute

It’s Oscar weekend and I’m attending Jerry Bruckheimer’s aunt’s Oscar party. I met her four years ago at the Chapel Hill Whole Foods. It was a meet cute.

My parents had a meet cute; they met at the soda fountain at F.W. Woolworth’s in Louisville. My mom, the working girl, waited on my dad, the grandson of the owner of the Broadway Department Store.

Back to my meet cute, one sunny day at the window counter in Whole Foods, Dorothy Moore turned and complimented me on my wide-brim hat. Five minutes later we agreed that cell phones bring out the worst in people and that Louisville is a great city. Ten minutes later we were laughing because I met my first husband and she met her ex-husband in Danville, Kentucky (at the Pioneer Playhouse, no less). Next, she was recounting her days of riding down Brownsboro Road in Warren Oates’ roadster in my hometown of Louisville.

Dorothy is passionate, spunky, and charming. She pulled me right in. Dorothy became my connection to the English Department at UNC (she was the former secretary) and the person that brought me back to my love of theater. One of my more memorable Dorothy dates was a lunch with the director Davis McCallum at Playmakers Repertory Theater in Chapel Hill.

Meet cute's sometimes turn into long-term relationships. Hollywood tells us that. Witness the contemporary movie The Holiday.

As much as I’m a sucker for a meet cute, I’m actually more into remeet cute's. Think Richard Linklater’s film (my favorite) Before Sunset.

My novel manuscript gives a couple a second chance in a remeet cute.

A few years into the writing, I set off for my biannual trip to Austin, Texas. One night in Austin I asked my mother-in-law (I’ll call her my MIL, herein) to drive us to Marble Falls to hear John Greenberg play guitar. “Who’s that?” she asked in her West Texas drawl, drawing out the word that to two syllables (at least).

“You know, you sent me his CD.”

“Oh,” she said in a resigned fashion, “I thought I sent you John Michael Murphy’s CD.”

So already you see the hand of fate at play.

My MIL drove me fifty minutes west of Austin, past Dripping Springs, to the River City Grille in Marble Falls, Texas.

Have you ever happened upon a splendid acoustic guitar show by sheer happenstance? Not much can compare.

At the break, I approached John Greenberg at the bar. I believe he was drinking tequila. I introduced myself as one of North Carolina’s demoiselles and rather humbly implored him to play his song, “Amy Walker.”

I told him I was writing a novel and that the song “Amy Walker” was really at the heart of the matter for me: Guitarist meets woman; he hides his attraction; she walks away; he writes song that says the next time I see you I’ll do better.

John was rather impressed that a Carolina girl had followed him down to the River City Grille. He said he'd play “Amy Walker” for me, but after the show. Then he explained that he would have to work up to that fine acoustic picking since he had just gotten back from Italy that day.

So my MIL and I enjoyed the second set, and as requested, stayed past the end of the show. John and his sidekick, the then president of the Western Writers of America, Mike Blakely, a man with a handlebar mustache (or should I say a handlebar mustache with a man), wowed us with their stage presence and then, after the show, cozied up to us at a coffee table just a foot beneath the stage. A few pleasantries were exchanged. How could she be my MIL? She looked so young.

They played a few songs. It was almost 1:00 a.m.--Central Time, folks. My MIL, in her best Ms. Runnels County 1965 Miss Congeniality voice, turns to John and says, “Now are you gonna play that Amy Walker song?”

First he played a bit of an intro that I recognized, and then he played his heart out. I was sitting directly to his right, and his right knee rested on my left knee while he played the song that completely captures the mood of my novel, the one with all the damn conflict and the remeet cute.

So I was gonna stop blogging here and did for a while because my cell phone rang. I recognized the caller immediately--an acoustic memory. It was the man I had the meet cute with at A Southern Season in Chapel Hill a few weeks back. He’s writing a story about GI’s in Paris that don’t want to go directly home after Vietnam. Tonight he spoke of meeting Jason Robards, Jr. in New York.

As for my cute meet with John Carden: I think it’s charming when a man orders a Campari at noon and tells me that it’s my fault. That’s what John Carden did the day we met. He began drinking early and blamed it on me. He also regaled me with a story of being in a café in Paris and having his female companion point out that Jean-Paul Sartre was sitting at the table next to theirs. “Say something to him,” his companion implored.

Before John could think of anything, Sartre said, in perfect English, “Do you have the time?”

John gave him the time of day and then Sartre said, “Time for me to go.”

And now, it is time for me to go.

I’ll leave you with the words of Robert Mitchum (remember, he was in the movie that scared the piss out of us in 1991), as uttered on the Johnny Carson Show, as told to me by John Carden, tonight on the phone, just before he invited me to his house in Ireland this summer: “There’s no one around that knows how to make movies anymore.”