moish01- this story is for you.
Getting back to the pressure thing-
This story goes back to early 2001.
The shadchan is one of the most dreaded shadchanim (if the not the most) amongst my friends. Just the sight of her number on the caller ID sent terror into the toughest guys. (To her credit, according to my wife, most girls consider her a savior.)
One particular girl got my name from somewhere and put this shadchan to work on getting me to go out with her. I never answered when she called so the shadchan called my parents and eventually resorted to other methods of pressure (which is not the scope of this thread). At one point I had agreed to go out with a different girl and I thought that the pressure would end. But no! The shadchan told the girl and she actually flew out to where my date lived while I was there. The shadchan called my parents to let me know that she’ll be on standby just in case it doesn’t work out. (My date didn’t work out and I wasn’t about to take her out so she just flew home.)
About two months later I buckled under the pressure and agreed to go out. (Some friends in yeshiva begged me just to get the shadchan off their backs.) The shadchan calls back and says that the girl wants to go out on Sunday, April 29th 2001.
I told the shadchan that I simply can’t go out on that day since I have a Computer Science project due midnight that night and I was planning on doing it on Sunday. But the shadchan informed me that since the girl is flying in for the date she gets to decide when we go out. And besides, she already booked the ticket and it will cost $25 to change.
So I planned the nerdiest date in the hopes that she will say NO.
Comes April 29th, I pick her up and she says “so, where are you taking me?”. I bit my tongue and said with a straight face “Well today the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge turns 62 so I thought we’d go to Francis Lewis Park at the base of the bridge and celebrate”.
“Sounds good I love bridges.”
Oh no, what do I do? It’s too late to apply for a change of venue (is that what lawyers call it?).
We get off The Van Wyck Expressway and she says “Yippee, a suspension bridge! I love suspension bridges”. So I bring out the cake and soda and apologize for not having a cake with 62 candles which she said was fine. I then pointed out how bad I felt for the bridge, pointing at all the cars crossing her and not a single one stops to show some gratitude by wishing her a happy birthday. (She sympathised with the bridge.)
She then started asking all kinds of questions about the bridge and her history which I made sure to give long detailed answers to. (There was a massive reconstruction project that was to start in the next few months and I learned all about it in a engineering class I was taking.)
She then asked me what other bridges were in the area so I took her to a lookout where we saw the George Washington Bridge and I told her that about a mile and a half to the east is the Throgs Neck Bridge and she asked if we could walk there. (We did.)
After the date, when I dropped her off at the place she was staying, she said “Thank you so much, I had such a good time. I was never so close to a suspension bridge before, I only hear about them in stories from my uncle, they don’t have any where I live.”
Oh well, at least I tried.