I spent a few more weeks pursuing the beauty queen hoping to pick up
where we left off. One day my friend and I rode down to the high
school she went to to drop in on her play practice and to see if she
wanted to hang out. When we arrived there was just a few minutes left
of practice and the lead in the play was a goofy looking bugger. He
was unreasonably tall and skinny with a perfectly spherical head. He
looked exactly like Jack the Pumpkin King from Tim Burton's A Nightmare Before Christmas.
 |
| Like this, but only more so. |
For some reason his preternatural look
was paired with the lurching movements of a stop motion animation
that really sold the Pumpkin King comparison. My friend and I joked
back and forth for the half hour we were waiting about what the real
life Pumpkin King might get up to. We were killing us, when the girl
was done she asked what we were laughing about. We told her our
previously hilarious joke and she looked at us completely stoically
unsmiling and unamused. There is no faster way to deflate some jokers
then to look at them steadily with a look of mild disgust. She told
us that he was a really nice guy and was very talented. We tried to
explain how we were not jerks, even though we most definitely were.
She collected her stuff and we asked if she wanted to go do
something. She gave it an overly brisk and non-negotiable no and said
we could do something another day when she had more time. The way she
said it I thought that was code for
'piss-right-off-and-never-come-back'. That was not the case because
she called me the next day to ask me out for a date.
