The Perfect Date: An Icebreaker

OR... Speech #1 - The Icebreaker:

This is draft of my first speech...  I'll have my thoughts on last week's meeting and being the TableTopics Master tomorrow...and then my thoughts on being (bum Bum BUM) the actual TOASTMASTER on Wednesday...or Thursday... actually prolly not Thursday - that's Game Day.  But sometime soon.  :)

On Friday, June 13th, 2008 I met the man I would marry and somehow convinced him to come with us to karaoke.  My friends later remarked that this was 'Perfect.'  But, as time passed, we learned that was really perfect about that night was the date, itself.  That’s right.  I met my husband for the first time on Friday the 13th.  

I was five when I saw my first scary movie.  My parents had put my sisters and I to bed, but I was piqued that I wasn’t “old enough” to stay up and watch the movie with my parents.  So after they turned off the lights, I crept down the stairs and curled behind the corner of the couch just as the movie started.  I watched the last three fourths of the movie from behind my fingers and with my teeth latched onto my bottom lip… too stubborn to admit defeat and go back to bed like a ‘baby,’ and too terrified of the repercussions of being caught to scream, squeal or climb onto the couch between my parents.

Being five though…  I hadn’t thought ahead to how to NOT get caught when the movie ended.  So in addition to having to swallow my pride and ask for the bathroom light to be left on and my bedroom door to be left open, I also wound up grounded for a week.   But it was too late.  The damage had been done.  I was hooked.

I spent the rest of my childhood trying to facilitate scary movie watching.  My parents wouldn’t allow us to watch anything with ‘adult content’ – which was almost everything since they were, at the time, VERY Southern Baptist – so I would engineer slumber parties at my friends’ houses instead of my own, knowing whose parents shared my parents strict standards and whose didn’t.  As I got older, I realized there was an entire section of movies hidden away, separate from the rest, in my parents room – so I would snatch upon any and every excuse I could think of for my parents to get out of the house.   I watched a lot of movies in bits and pieces – effectively ruining the scary factor – that way.

Between my parents censorship and the time delay between the US and Japan, where I spent roughly half my childhood, I missed a LOT of movies.  So the instant I struck out on my own, I started making up for lost time… and now I realize that, for me, Horror Movies are a lot like Pokemon… I gotta catch them all.

But my love for all things Horror isn’t the only reason that it makes sense I would meet the man of my dreams on a night they made an entire set of Horror flicks about.

Friday the 13th is also widely considered an ‘unlucky’ day… and one of the first things we learned in our relationship is that, together, the two of us have to be the Unluckiest entity on the planet.  We could eat at McDonalds morning, noon and night and never win so much as a small drink with the purchase of a sammich and fries from the Monopoly game.  In fact, we would probably find the one sticker some jerk printed on his last day at the sticker factory that says “Do not pass Go, Do Not Collect $200” and somehow – wind up in jail.

For example:  When we went to Bonnaroo for our first anniversary, we bought a new tent since the one we had was missing some pieces.  When we reached the festival and started setting it up… we found that the tarp piece that stretches from the ground on one side, up over the top and back to the ground on the other side, was missing.  No biggie.  A typical day in June in Nashville is beautiful and hot.  Our tent top was mostly mesh, so the heat would just pass up on through, rather than getting trapped inside…  About twenty minutes after we finished setting up – it started raining.  Not just raining, thunderstorms of biblical proportions.  Then my husbands air mattress popped.  Then our roommate called to let us know it was hailing in Austin and Robbie’s windshield had been cracked…  You get the picture – and I left out the flight delays, rental car fiasco, demon spawned GPS and psychotic frat boys.

Over the years we have learned to just shake our heads and laugh, or shrug at our bad luck.  My husband has learned to not question my desperate need to DVR things like ‘Dinocroc vs. Supergator’  and ‘Frankenfish’ and our friends have learned it’s safest if we all travel separately.  So when it came time to pick a wedding date, it only made sense to pick the anniversary of the day we met, rather than the day we officially decided to not date anyone else.  And while some couples renew their vows on the fifth, tenth or twenty-fifth anniversaries, we plan to celebrate our “Teenths” – any time our anniversary falls on Friday the 13th, because, for us, that is The Perfect Date.

:)