Honey, Love The One You're With...

The best Valentine's Day ever was back when I was a Senior at Stonehill...and not because my doofy college boyfriend showered me with love and affection and roses and a heart-shaped box of those nasty cream-filled and cherry cordial chocolates and all that cheesy crap. No, my friends....if you know anything about me, you know that long ago I imposed a moratorium on celebrating Valentine's Day in the traditional fashion. You know, I think it's kind of an insipid little holiday...and it puts undue pressure on relationships, and who in hell needs more pressure? Yeah, not me. Ok, so, I am not particularly romantic...in fact, I am pretty certain my husband and former beaux would collectively agree that I have been known to be just a teensy, weensy bit jaded and cynical...maybe I am missing a chip or something. I mean, I'll admit to being a total chick when it comes to weeping alone in my car as I play and replay some emotionally draining and mysteriously appropriate song...but that is about as far as it goes. I am German-Irish for crissakes -- two cultures not really known for taking a chance on demonstrative touchy-feely-ness or profusely pouring out our hearts without being about 20 beers in...(oh, make no mistake, I've tried this heart pouring thing and it hurts waaaaay too much...). Also, my birthday is mere weeks past February 14th, and frankly, I would much rather be toasted and feted and celebrated and pampered and showered with gifts on that day (or the whole week...). The other thing is that I have a tough time getting behind a holiday whose sole purpose is to sell cards to guys who need reminding that they love and cherish their mommy/wife/kids/girlfriend/side-slice/f**k buddy and that they should be telling them that on this one special day per year only. Now, that being said, should the desire strike any of you to pick up some shiny and expensive bauble for me this week, I would certainly accept it graciously....you know, I may be jaded and cynical, but I am also quite sensible and well-mannered....and I love me some nice, shiny baubles.

But I am getting off track...back to Stonehill and Valentine's 1992.... It was a week or so earlier, when the school's radio station, WSHL, announced that they would be collecting Valentine's messages on little purple scraps of paper that were on all the tables in the caf and reading them on-air the evening before Valentine's Day. And I think it was Michelle who had the hilarious brainstorm that Friday prior to collect as many of those little sheets as possible, so that we Orleans A girls could create and submit a bevy of false Valentine's to be read for the entire student body to enjoy and ponder...Hey, and so what if we caused some romantic bumps in the road, as long as we were amused...you know, why not make a complete mockery of the process, we were quite

excellent at that. So that night after Brother Mike's Happy Hour, with a nice beer buzz on, we all congregated downstairs in Orleans lobby and Michelle made the rules: she would randomly call on one of us to give a guy's name, the next person was to give a girl's name and the next one would create the "message." And this is what we did....50 times over. What a bunch of b*tches, right?

Some of our little messages were innocuous: To Linda S----- Hi! Love, Dave F---- or Hi Tim Q--- See you in the caf! Love, Carolyn C-----. And then there were a few more intriguing entries like: Dear Kevin B---- I am dying to get to know you better. Love, Aimee B---- or Hey Chris S.---- You are so hot! Love, Elaine B-----. At one point Michelle asked Jeanne for a guy's name and she goes: "the Dobber" and then she turns to me and asks for a girl, to which I replied: "Your Wild Irish Rose"....which my friends found riotous and so stupidly fun, we decided to leave it at that: Dear Dobber, Love, Your Wild Irish Rose...(hello, foreshadowing....). So the whole time we were creating these naughty little false messages, we were hysterically laughing and having so much fun...you know, we were pretty certain no one would really listen to the radio that night anyway, it was all going to be our fun little secret. And with that in mind, before the night was through, I snagged a blank sheet and added my own message to my secret campus love and slid it between the sheets we had concocted and collected. Michelle dropped them in the collection box in the caf that next morning.

So fast forward to that Thursday night, February 13, 1992 at 10 p.m., again, following Brother Mike's Happy Hour...again a little buzzing from the cheap beer...again, the Orleans A girls and a posse of hangers-on whom we had clued in congregated in Orleans lobby with WSHL blasting. And don't you know it....of the 75 or so messages read across the airwarves, all 50 of ours made the cut. Everytime the two DJs (actually, friends of ours as luck would have it...) read one of our false messages a roar rose up from the lobby, hysterical laughter bouncing off the walls.

And as the night came to a close, the DJ, a girl named Kristin who happened to be an English major and in a bunch of my classes says: "I love this next message and am dying to know w

ho wrote it...here goes: 'Dear Professor Morin, I will be your Hester Prynne if you will be my Moby Dick...All my love'..." I saw Michelle shoot me a look, and I knew she knew....we busted out laughing again and she kept saying "I cannot believe you had the balls!" It was kind of surprising, I guess, because I barely looked Professor Morin in the face all year for fear I might jump into his arms should he catch my eye, but still everyone knew my secret....Yeah, Mo Morin was no hottie or anything with his salt and pepper beard, not someone who might rival Brad Pitt, that's for sure...but sorry, I had a thing for him and his Romantic Literature course in which we read and dissected both Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick...and his constant innuendo-ing always got me...you know, those old dirty talkers must do it for me...so I decided to give it right back to him. And best of all, I got it off my chest and was 99.9% certain he would never know anything of it.

So the next morning the campus was abuzz with gossip....people trying to decode the 50 false messages, wondering how they came to be...one of our housemates even heard Dave F. accusing his friends of sending the fake message to Linda S., saying: "You guys are the only ones who know how much I hate her...which one of you did it?" !!!!!!!!!!! How effing funny is that?? So, we kept it to ourselves...kind of giggling at the idiocy of our fellow students...why were we 

the only people on campus who thought to infiltrate the process and stir up some controversy via false Valentine's...didn't take a genius to come up with that plan (although Michelle was and is a bona fide genius...).

And so, Valentine's Day passed, and so did the weekend and the next few weeks...and the false Valentine's were forgotten pretty much, though we would giggle with one another here and there....until....Senior 50 Days celebration Saturday, April 3, 1992. Honestly, I have an awesome memory, but those final weekends at Stonehill are kind of fuzzy except for this one incident....I was at the bar at Brother Mike's and it was early so the place was kind of empty-ish...I think it was just Ali, Michelle and I with Jimmy Brown and his posse of soccer guys...and this football guy Mike Casey was there too, who was someone I knew but didn't talk to that much, except for that night...The place began to fill up around us and Mike and I were a little buzzed and still hanging out when the Dobber appeared at my side....and in my hazy buzziness I remembered the false Valentine's and stupidly I decided it was time to tell Dobber about the secret message...but again, being a few beers in, my thoughts were ahead of my mouth and I grabbed Dobber's hand and said:

"Dobber, I am your Wild Irish Rose."

And I knew what I meant...I meant that it was me who made up that silly, funny, stupid fake message. But based on what I said, would you have figured that out? Of course not...and neither did Dobber. Now let me say this...the Dobber was an awesome guy and I would have been beyond lucky to date him back then. You know, we don't see or talk to each other much these days, but when we do, it is by email and we chat and giggle and get along swimmingly...in fact, I am certain he has blocked out this entire episode. So anyway...after my jumbled admission, Dobber's face denotes his utter surprise and then so sweetly he smiles and says: "That was you?" and again, stupidly drunk, I nod....and he goes: "wow..." and then without a moment's notice Dobber pulls me towards himself and plants his mouth upon mine, arms wrapped around my neck...clearly thinking that then and there I had professed my true love for him. And I was completely stunned....it took me a minute to figure out that he misunderstood (well, of course he did...I made no g*ddamn sense...) and I begin to pull back and kind of protest when the next thing I knew, Mike Casey, defending my honor, is pulling him off of me and tossing my dear old Dobber across the bar like a rag doll...And poor Dobber is totally confused...and I nervously begin to laugh and Mike is saying: "Are you ok?" and I am nodding and looking at Dobber and saying: "No Dobber, that's not what I meant..."...ugh...what a total jacka** I was...Somehow I think Ali got involved and explained the deal...and I looked over at Dobber and smiled meekly...and his feelings were quite apparently hurt. Well, how nice of me to embarrass him like that...ugh. I felt like a jerk so I left Mike's side and went back to Orleans A early that night. I remember telling Jeanne the story when I got back and she just silently shook her head at me...I was ashamed and I totally deserved it....you know, kind of a little like Hester Prynne...

But even with that one little glitch, Valentine's Day 1992 is still my very favorite ever....because it was later that final semester when I learned that the Valentine's message DJ, Kristin the English major, also had a crush on Mo Morin...and as an excuse to talk to him, she brought him the sheet on which I wrote my secret love note to him. She told me later that she had no idea it was me who wrote it until much later, and that she wished she had thought to do the same thing because when she brought him the note he blushed (I made the dirty talker blush...can you imagine??) and kind of laughed and said: "Well now that is very creative." !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I absolutely swooned...could there be a better compliment from an English professor? Even though I was still an anonymous admirer, I felt totally satisfied with his reaction...that was all I wanted, for Mo Morin to think I was something special. Well, apparently he never realized it was me...or if he did, it didn't sway his opinion of my final papers...I ended the year with a B- in Romantic Literature...so much for being his Hester Prynne....

This year my Valentine's Day will most definitely rival and possibly trump that day in 1992...My friend Kathleen and I are crossing two whole bridges (yeah, we're not afraid...) and embarking on a trek through that crowded foreign land called Long Island. Why ever would we do that, you ask? Barry Effing Manilow at the Nassau Coliseum, baby!!!!!!!! Can you think of a more fitting way to spend a husband-less Valentine's evening? Of course, even though the show is at 8 p.m. and Long Island is no more than 20 miles away, we will leave New Jersey by 3 o'clock just in case we get mired in that legendary Long Island Expressway traffic...going one mile in 3 hours is a daily occurrance....Yes, we will brave the ridiculousness for 

our man Barry...I mean, who doesn't love Barry? (I beg of you to click that link, by the way...)  Maybe we can even snag a little dinner out there...even though it is Valentine's Day and we fully expect our concert-going and dinner table neighbors to assume we are a lesbian couple celebrating our love of cheesy music and sappy songwriting...Well let them! Who cares, really? Maybe we'll even play it up...isn't Barry worth the entire Island of Length thinking that Kathleen and I are two hot Jersey lesbians out for a good time on V-Day? I mean, at least the pressure is off our beloveds...no need to rush out for a stack of Hallmark cards and heart shaped boxes of creamy cherry-ish chocolates or something...

Much love this Valentine's to all you Mobys out there....

Your girl,

Hester Prynne

Photo 1: Just a little caricature of my Valentine's Day hotness circa '92...it's quite an accurate depiction, no?

Photo 2: Hey, I am more than happy to accept glittery gifts...even on V-Day...

Photo 3: Kickass college radio, WSHL of Easton, MA...Time Warp Top 40 anyone???

Photo 4: The Women of Orleans A...pre-false Valentine-ing...

Photo 5: Me and Jeanne on way back from Brother Mike's for V-Day shenanigans...a little roadie is never a problem, right?

Photo 6: That vision of dirty talking literary deliciousness, Mo Morin...I know, I have such issues...

Photo 7: A sampling of the Class of '92 partaking in a little Brother Mike's down time....you know, pretty sure I couldn't name a one of them...must have been their first visit...

Photo 8: That little Wild Irish Rose....the real one....

Photo 9: What Dobber looked like after Mike Casey got his hands on him...

Photo 10: I so would have dressed up in that naughty Puritanical slut garb if Mo Morin had said the word...

Photo 11: Looks like a light traffic day on The L.I.E....must have been a Sunday morning or something...

Photo 12: Kathleen and I picked out this cake topper for our first Valentine's Day celebration as a couple...hope she gets me some nasty cream-filled chocolates!!