Flippy - I Rant, You Read
Friday, September 01, 2006
Las Vegas Personals - Huh?
Leigh-Ann and I were downstairs having some lovely watermelon and finishing reading this morning’s paper. The watermelon was really cheap because it had seeds, but it’s super tasty. Anyway, I was reading the Neon section (it’s Las Vegas, heh, neon, get it?) which is our Friday entertainment section. Hey, did you know Josh Gracin is playing at Boulder Station? Only $17.50 plus tax - hold me back. I rarely look at the personals, but decided to check out the W4W ads. Right there in front of Leigh-Ann. I’m bold, I am.
The thing about the ads that surprised me the most was how absolutely dull they were. They may as well have said, “Boring GWF 45 seeks another stupendously boring GWF who likes to take long walks, hold hands, eat vanilla ice-cream, laughs at Family Circus every day, doesn’t like spicy food, hates to read, and loves to shop at Wal-Mart. Please send postcard, computers are boring.” One ad had a woman who smoked actually looking for another woman who smoked. Okay, I get that some people smoke, but requiring a date to smoke? What, do they need someone around so they don’t have to buy their own cigarettes?
But the pièce de résistance was “loves long walks on the beach”. I’m not sure if they’ve noticed, but there’s a dearth of beaches...in the middle of the desert. There’s more of a possibility of a fulfilling date if she’d written that she loves to romp in the snow, because Mt. Charleston is only about thirty to forty minutes from the Strip. But, long walks on the beach are about 4.5 hours away. I’m a little tempted to answer the ad, just for research purposes. I could propose a first date at Mandalay Bay Beach. Oh, if only Boulder Station had a beach, then we could see Josh Gracin on our first date too. Drats!
So you’re thinking to yourself, “Oh, so you think you can do better, Flippy?” Well, yeah. Of course, I wasn’t really looking for a date with the ad, but I don’t think that should disqualify me. I placed an ad once in the LA Weekly. It was an idea borne late at night while on the phone with a friend. I did it to see if I could get “Ad of the Week”, which meant that I would get two free weeks and an ad with a lovely bold outline. I still have the original ad somewhere. It went something like this, or to be honest, exactly like this: Ugly, fat, macrocephalic circus lady with tattoos seeks same for drive-in movie fun. Friendly femmes under 30, please. When you place the ad, they give you a voicemail box with a number. I was really excited to see my ad in the paper because, well, I was bored...and I wanted to see if I got Ad of the Week. I did! Do you want to know who answers an ad like that? Even though I specifically put the ad in W4W, every single response except for one was a scary freaky man. What part of “seeks same” and “femme” did they not understand? I also got one other response, from a woman who actually had a sense of humor. (Hi, Crys) We even dated for a few months or so. I wasn’t sure I wanted to even respond to her voicemail because what if she’d been like all of the freaky men who answered? Ick. Thankfully, she wasn’t.
Several weeks after my ad stopped running, I received a thick envelope in the mail, forwarded to me from the LA Weekly office. Enclosed was a letter and a bunch of photocopied newspaper clippings. It was from the assistant of artist Joel-Peter Witkin, offering to pay me to model for him. The newspaper clippings were to let me know he was a serious artist and that he’d been shown in galleries and such. First of all, lots of his art is gross. Really really gross. Second of all, who in their right mind would’ve thought that ad was serious? An ugly circus lady with an abnormally large head wanting to date another ugly circus lady with an abnormally large head (I think I was flipping through the dictionary looking for strange things and I liked the sound of macrocephalic) for dates at the drive-in? Seriously are there any people who specifically want to date someone they think is ugly? I mean, we can’t all date Cindy Crawford (showing my age here), but we all want to date someone to whom we’re attracted, don’t we?
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Great story, Flippy! This wins my (brand new, prize-less) blog post of the week contest. I love to read personal ads for fun. I’ve hardly ever seen anybody that looked like someone I would want to date, but it’s fun to note the similarities - straight people are just as bad with the “long walks on the beach” - hah! in the desert! And fun to find the really freaky ads, like yours. And the ones I’m afraid were not jokes. How cool that you actually met someone nice from that ad!
Nancy on 09/03 at 02:35 AM -
I wonder how many of the ad ladies admit they are going to bring along the U-Haul?
If nothing else seeing something like that in a personal would make me laugh enough to look into the chick.I miss girls.
Jack's Raging Mommy on 09/10 at 01:30 PM
