When Katr and I bought our condo, our lawyer was named Howard Stern. I mention his name because a) it's funny and b) we liked him. We also had an insurance agent. I'm not going to tell you our insurance agent's name, but I WILL tell you that it rhymes with "Bammy", a.k.a. "Ol' Bambone".
Bammy was born to be an insurance salesman. He was gregarious, laughed at all my stupid jokes, encouraged a culture of fear, was prematurely balding and nearly soiled his Dockers when a homeless guy looked at him funny through the window of the Second Cup. He was a nice man, but the kind of person who makes you want to chew your foot off. And then beat him with it.
Bambone liked to really get to know his victims and, in an effort to show how cool he was with his first lesbian clients (as he told us several times), he asked us when we'd met. "Oh, you know, six months ago," says I, knowing that a guy who'd never had lesbian clients before might not understand our "we're buying property after knowing each other 3 months" U-Haul lesbian shack-up. And then he asked "So . . . how did you two meet?"
Katr and I did not particularly want to tell Bammy how we met. There was a short pause.
"Well," I said to Bambone, "it was like this. I was walking down the street one day and there was this burning building. There was a crowd gathering around it. I stopped to see if I could help and at that moment, Katr came hurtling out of this burning building with a baby in her arms. Well, she ran smack into me! And the baby went flying! And I caught the baby! So later, as the mayor was giving us both the key to the city, I leaned over to Katr and said "Hey, so . . . do you want to have coffee sometime?"
Katr had never heard this version of events before and the look on her face was more "Whaaa?" than "It's true. I fell in love with her for her lightning reflexes". Bammy looked from me to Katr and back. "No," he says, "really. Where did you two meet?" Katr and I exchanged glances. Bammy couldn't take it anymore. "Sex party? Was it at a sex party?"
Oh, Bambone. You should come into the city more often.
The true story, since NYEx asked, is this: my friend Sura and I were single and we decided that if neither of us had 
gotten any action by a certain date (I believe it was July 28, 2003), we would get into the online dating thing. One long weekend in May, my roommate Jesk was out of town and I was up at 1:00 a.m. reading the recaps for The Bachelor on Television Without Pity. Now, as some of you long-time TWOP fans may recall, they used to have Spring Street Personals (the same as on The Onion and Nerve) on there, before TWOP went all Yahoo. And so, to prepare myself for the upcoming online dating challenge, I did a search for lesbians of Toronto. If you're not a registered user, only 7 personals come up. I breezed through the first 6 ads ("I like cats!" "I like camping!" "What's in my bedroom? An econo-size bottle of lube!") and almost skipped Katr's, which was the 7th. But then I noticed, in the course of my prefunctory glancing, that she'd answered "What book are you reading right now?" with "For some reason, every summer I have to re-read Microserfs. Very geeky."
So I sat there and read her whole ad. And even though her ad included a mention of cats and also the outdoors, I started blushing like crazy, by myself in a dark room, and I could hear my heart beating in my ears and I thought "Well, clearly she is my girlfriend. If I can just convince HER of that, we can get this thing going."
I spent my entire Sunday painstakingly crafting a personal ad that I hoped would appeal to her. And then I spent $25US to buy credits so that I could e-mail her. And then I spent most of the night painstakingly crafting the e-mail that I would send. And then I sent it. And I am happy to say that it was the best $25US and 36 hours I ever invested.
So basically, I got lucky folks! If she had happened not to update her personal that day - if I hadn't been reading recaps of crappy reality shows late at night on my roommate's computer - if Jupiter had been in the 8th house instead of the 5th - we might have missed each other. Buuuut hey - we didn't. Woohoo love!
And that, my friends, is the story that one of you wanted to hear. And that some of you know by heart. I never tire of telling it. Especially the part about Bambone.
As an addendum - Sura too met a young lady before our action plan deadline. But Sura, unfortunately, did not fare as well as I this time 'round. I ran into her ex-girlfriend a couple of months ago and had the extremely uncomfortable experience of not remembering her real name but DEFINITELY remembering the mean nickname I had invented for her. Which was "Boozehound".
