Published on YourHub.com, 4/8/07

Six months ago I sat at a back table at Davio’s on Newbury Street with my two sisters and our mother. It was our yearly girl’s weekend and the place was hopping. Sumptuous food, beautiful people and desserts so good I ordered two.

Our usual goofy selves were making faces and inside jokes that I’m sure were the envy of the restaurant. That is, if they even knew we were there.

Then the question came up: “What was your worst date ever?”

My mother, of course, had only dated my father. Unless you count Norman, who had a pool and gave her a pin.

One of my sisters said her ex-husband could qualify for more than just a bad date. She certainly had us trumped there.

I offered the time Steve arrived in my driveway, honking his horn for me, with a bumper sticker that said, “I LOVE INTERCOURSE.” In teeny letters on the bottom of the sticker, it read, “pennsylvania”. I was 15.

I had a lot more stories, but thought I should stop and give someone else a turn.

My eldest sister told of a beautiful evening in Florida during a sales conference with Xerox. She and Larry had been nursing a small attraction, as many young executives do with their coworkers.

Larry was a phonetic man. He looked exactly how his name sounds. Brown hair, a bit long and unkempt, a doughy physique. The kind of person you look back on with wonderment of what you might have been attracted to. He would subsequently force us to say his name out of the side of our mouths with a nasal tone as if he were on a sitcom, the catch phrase being an exhausted, “Oh, Larry!”

After a dinner meeting, highlighted by an awards ceremony, my sister and Larry went for a walk on the warm Floridian sidewalk strip outside their hotel. A car full of teenagers drove by and slowed, and a clap was heard. Larry flung his arms up in distress and yelled, “I’VE BEEN SHOT!”

My sister, a step behind him could see his back clearly in the moonlight, the yolk and cracked egg shell dripping down his coat jacket.

“I think you’re going to pull through, Larry,” was all she could muster.

Of course, that would be the last of Larry.

But Larry getting capped on a Florida sidewalk gave us a great memory for the weekend, and for that we thank him, often, with the now popular catch phrase, “Oh Larry!”