Red Wine + an Unlimited Text Plan + an Eligible Bachelor = Italy, of course!
Ladies and gentlemen, we interrupt your regularly scheduled programming to bring you the following announcement: I am having a heart attack. Like seriously. I mean not seriously seriously—as far as I can tell all of my vital organs are all in good working order— but something fairly substantial has happened in the ongoing saga of me and Date #7.
A few nights ago, I attended my first wine tasting at Bistro Romano, the Italian restaurant in Society Hill that’s hosting the show I’m co-producing this fall. Having attended several wine tastings before (including this one with my grandmother) I know the drill:
I will always prefer red wine to white.
I will always end up tipsy and craving raw cookie dough.
I will always resort to drunk-texting before the evening is out.
Seeing as I still have the phone numbers of at least a dozen previous dates stored in my cell phone, I’m pretty much perpetually on the brink of disaster.
But it’s okay—I like living on the edge. It makes wine tastings with one’s parents much more exciting— kind of like Russian roulette (Who will Kat drunk dial this time?)— and now that Date #7 and I seem to have found ourselves on level ground (at least for the time being), I decided to a friendly little “hello,” or two (or twenty) wouldn’t hurt.
Now for the next part of this story to make sense, I need to explain a bit more about where things currently stand between Date #7 and me. Having spent the majority of my adult life in a series of long term, long distance relationships, I consider the five hour drive to Pittsburgh to be child’s play. Date #7, however, has never been in a long distance relationship and although he’s very into the idea of us, he’s less adept at figuring out the logistics (i.e. actually inviting me to visit).
Lately, he’s been telling me I’m very practical, presumably because I keep saying things like “Less talk about soul mates and more talk about schedules, okay?” but still: I don’t think anyone has ever called me “practical” before.
In fact, if you’re reading this, you already know that I am the polar opposite of practical. I take six pairs of shoes with me for a weekend getaway! I wear heels to walk to Center City!
Sure I’m organized and I like to plan ahead but I’ve always believed that practicality and rationality ought to go hand in hand and I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly rational person, especially as far as matters of the heart are concerned.
Nonetheless, someone’s got to stay grounded in this relationship. And that someone is definitely not Date #7, at least not most of the time.
It’s taken weeks for him to realize that he’d like me to come to Pittsburgh. Weeks! He likes to take things “one day at a time” but my days don’t work that way (for example: I started monitoring airfare to Pittsburgh long before we even met).
But then, the night of wine tasting, I start texting him to alert him to the provenance of each wine as I drink it.
“I’m sampling a Pinot Grigio from the such-and-such region of France.” This leads to “I’ve never been to Paris” (him) followed by “I was too young to appreciate it at the time” (me). By the time the servers bring out the reds, we’re talking Madrid, Barcelona, and renting a villa in Tuscany.
Of course it’s all hypothetical. I mean, I’m at a wine tasting! Everyone knows that text messages sent during periods of great alcohol consumption aren’t meant to be taken seriously. We just met! I haven’t even been to Pittsburgh yet—what the hell are we going to do at a villa in Tuscany?
(That was meant as a rhetorical question, by the way.)
Then I stagger home—not because I’m drunk mind you, but because I’m wearing stilettos and trying not to drop my bottle of wine on the cobblestoned streets of Society Hill— and once I arrive, I pull up my email. There I find a message from Date #7.
It’s contents?
Well folks, you’re going to have to check back tomorrow for the rest of this story.
Kat Echevarría Richter 
7 Responses to “Red Wine + an Unlimited Text Plan + an Eligible Bachelor = Italy, of course!”
Drunk dialers are the best! I need to find some more lush friends to hand my number to. I miss those hilarious 2AM wake-up calls wherein they’re trying to explain some physics-based problem, or world hunger, or professing their love for someone (usually not me). Those were the days!
If the email is anything other than, “I’ve booked us that villa in Tuscany and a couple of first-class tickets,” I don’t wanna hear it. 😉
I’m with Katie. 😉
Me too!!
Pittsburgh air fares probably drop even more in the winter. It’s so cold there, I can’t imagine anyone goes for fun.
I would imagine that Kat intended to go to Pittsburgh for fu, what ever the weather
[…] My main beef with the book was that Johnson tried to turn everything in a learning experience, whether the date warranted it or not. I know I go on and on about my “anthropological” investigation of modern courtship but I like to think I generally maintain a sense of humor about it. When you look as dating as fieldwork (like I do) or as “a one-month master’s course in men” (as Johnson did) you can’t take yourself too seriously. (Remember that the next time you’re reading this, Date #7.) […]