This Is the Story of My Story
It’s 1936. And Teddy Rosen has a date with some girl named Jane Stein who spends her summers in Michiana, Michigan, which owes its rather picaresque name to the fact that it lies on the border of Michigan and Indiana. Teddy summers in Michigan City, Michigan, which isn’t exactly a hop, skip and a jump from Michiana. Teddy has decided he wants to break his date with Jane. Only Teddy doesn’t have the thirty-five cents to make the long-distance call and let her know he isn’t going to show. One of Teddy’s friends in Michigan City hears he’s planning to blow this girl off without so much as a phone call. Mostly because he’s flat broke. Also because he’s just not that into her. Jane is all of 13. Teddy and his friend, Lenny, are both 16.
“Jesus, that’s terrible,” Lenny thinks. Like Teddy, Lenny also summers in Michigan City.
Lenny doesn’t have much to do on that lazy afternoon in Michigan City. Also like Teddy, he doesn’t have the thirty-five cents required to call up this girl and move in on his pal. But he’s thinking, Jane Stein, huh, what the heck? So he rounds up a few of his friends who are in the mood for an adventure. Including one guy who owns a Model A Ford Roadster—which is a helluva lot more impressive than thirty-five cents in your pocket—and they take a ride out to Michiana. Sans Teddy Rosen. Cut to:
“Hey, Jane?” Pause. “Jane Stein?” Lenny calls out, as the Model A pulls up in front of her parents’ summer home in Michiana.
She comes out the front door and into the yard to see who’s calling her.
Yeah, she’s cute. Worth the trip.
“Yeah, who is it?” the 13 year-old future Miss Hillel of the University of Illinois asks the car full of 16 year-old boys.
“We’re friends of Teddy Rosen’s,” Lenny explains. Adding, “He’s not coming tonight. But you want to go to a beach party with us instead?”
“Okay,” Jane replies. Down for whatever. “Hold on, let me get my cap and my suit.”
“No problem,” the driver of the car tells her, “We’ll wait.”
Jane goes inside and comes back out a few minutes later, just like she promised she would. That’s the story of my grandparents’ first date.
Cut to: 2008. They’ve been married 67 years. There’s a bit more to the story. But it doesn’t get any better.
Sorry, Teddy.
• Greg Oguss teaches media studies at USC. He's been published in Babble and Beat, Off Beat Pulp, Gloom Cupboard and on Green Panda Press, among other places.
