Certain professions should require mandatory uniforms, I believe

She was one of the most striking women I’d ever seen. Undulating, ink-black hair trailing like dark rain over delicate shoulders, eyes greener than a St. Patrick’s Day in Dublin, a shape that might have prompted the Pope to look twice. Her voice was pure music, avian poetry, even when competing with the noise of the crowded bar.

I wasn’t in love, but I figured I would be within the next 20 minutes or so.

And here she was, sitting with some girlfriends at the club in which my little bar band was working. Every guy in the joint cast furtive glances her way – except for those who simply stared openly: hungry wolves contemplating a wounded lamb.

To her credit, she seemed unaware (and unimpressed) by the attention. My guess was she had grown used to it.

The band went on break and I said hi as I walked past her table; too smooth and cool to actually be hitting on anyone, y’know, just an employee of the bar being polite and all that. That’s the vibe I was going for, at least.

Maybe I hit my mark, maybe not, but one of the young ladies at the table stopped me and requested a song. It was her sister Mary’s favorite, she said. Mary, as in the raven-haired beauty of my dreams to whom I was currently not paying any special attention. There’s an art to this sort of thing and though I was at the time a clumsy practitioner, I at least knew which end of the brush to dip into the paint.

I turned to Mary, planning to say something charming and witty, but my voice got all tangled up around my heart somewhere. Seeing her up close made my knees go all funny. I struggled mightily to hide this, and failed.

“Um, yeah, we can do that tune,” I said. Everyone can do that tune. But nobody wants to. Not even Van Morrison, who wrote it and has probably made millions off the thing. It’s one of the most hated – and most requested – songs in the bar band business. Not as hated as “Freebird,” but real close. But for Mary, I’d have happily beat the tune out on my skull with a rubber mallet.

“Oh, thank you so much,” Mary said, taking my hand in hers for the briefest of moments.

What I wanted to say was, “It’s my pleasure! I love you. Will you marry me?” What I actually said was, “No problem.”

I made to stumble away to the bar, where I hoped a small shot of whisky might serve to steady my knees. Mary had other ideas.

“Would you like to join us?” she said.

I felt it took me waaaay too long to process her words and respond, but it was probably only a few clumsy seconds.

“Uh, sure, thanks,” I stammered. I sent up a quick prayer of thanks, grateful I had chosen music over plumbing as a lifelong profession. Plumbers rarely get invited to join a table of beautiful women, although they make considerably more money than do guitar players.

Mary and I spent the next 20 minutes chatting, laughing. Her direct gaze was disconcerting, disorienting, but I soon fell into the rhythm of our conversation and even managed to scare up a little wit and charm after all.

I went so far as to break my long-established rule and buy a round for the table. That left me broke, but Mary was worth it. I even liked her friends, or family, as the case must have been. Two of them, after all, repeatedly referred to her as “sister.”

And I suppose you can see where this is going. Mary was a sister, all righty. A Catholic sister. A nun. I figured it out just before going back onstage for second set.

My memories of nuns, accumulated while attending St. Isadore school as a child, are not good ones. In my youth, nuns were dark engines of rosary-fueled destruction; black-and-white bastions of God’s wrath, ready to unleash torrents of righteous punishment on any wayward fourth grader. I had been wayward a lot.

To my recollection, those nuns never dressed in “civilian” clothes and none looked anything like Mary. If they had, I’m sure my current math skills would be better than they are.

This all happened nearly 30 years ago. But I learned my lesson well: never buy drinks for married women, especially those married to deities.

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I’m in love, at least in the digital sense

I’m in dangerous territory here and I know it. I’ve fallen in love. Not real love, but the kind of love a third-grade kid feels for his 23-year-old teacher. I guess infatuation would be a better term; more accurate, at least. But it’s definitely something.

To compound the problem, the person for whom I’ve fallen isn’t even a real person, at least not yet. She’s just a couple photos and a dozen emails. So far, she’s not even a phone call, just a series of electronic pixels exchanged via the internet.

But I’m crazy about her.

Sure, I know it’s juvenile in the extreme, but I can’t help myself. We’ve emailed back and forth pretty much non-stop for the past couple days, and if it’s possible to fall for someone based on nothing but the written word, then I have.

I’ve heard about situations like this, but never thought it would happen to me. I’m just not the sort of guy to whom this sort of thing happens. I’m not a hopeless romantic, I’m not naïve, I don’t believe in “fate,” and I’m not particularly lonely, desperate or insecure. I don’t have trouble meeting women in “real life.” I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not Brad Pitt, but I do okay for a guy my age.

And still I’ve been checking my in-box every 20 minutes since the day we “met,” waiting for her next email.

So what is about this girl that’s disturbing my otherwise tranquil life? Well, she’s southern for one thing. Even in her writing her accent is evident, and I like it, a lot. And speaking of writing, she’s good at it; she communicates well with the written word—you wouldn’t believe how rare that is these days.

I even like her name.

Then there’s the fact she likes the same things I do, and I’m not just talking about the “thunderstorms and long walks on the beach” kind of baloney. She’s a fisherman. That’s one of the building blocks of a perfect relationship, far as I’m concerned. She likes dogs. She hates winter and is afraid to ride street motorcycles, same as me.

She loves to read and laugh (which is how we “met,” but that’s a story for another time). She likes flea markets. If she has a flaw, it’s that she loves to dance. I’m hoping this love won’t extend to wanting me to dance. But if it does, well, who knows, maybe I’ll go against everything I believe and learn a couple steps myself. (Though, she’ll have to be pretty darn wonderful for this to happen!)

We’re supposed to meet this Saturday, face to (gasp!) face. And yeah, I know chances are we won’t even like each other once we’re actually looking at each other over cups of coffee, tea or mint juleps (remember, she’s southern). She won’t like the way I smell, or I won’t like the sound of her voice. The pheromones will be all wrong. She’ll remind me too much of my sister or I’ll remind her too much of her drunk Uncle Harry.

There’s a million reasons we won’t hit it off.

But we might. Meanwhile, I get to feel hopeful, and that’s not a bad thing, not a bad thing at all.

More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com

Maybe I can get Tiger’s ghost writer to help with my new book

I am so glad Susan Sarandan and Tim Robbins broke up. I know, they seemed like a nice couple and have been married a long time. And divorce – brother do I know it – is not a pretty thing.

But their Hollywood split has served a larger purpose; namely, it has briefly focused media attention away from Tiger Woods. That can only be seen as a good thing.

For weeks, the little news ticker running down the right side of my laptop’s screen has served up story after story about Mr. Woods’ latest dalliance. For some reason, “news” folks just can’t seem to get enough of heavily-augmented girls “coming clean” over their brief, torrid affairs with the famous duffer.

When did golf get sexy, anyway? Wait a minute; I think I can answer that one myself – when golfers started earning millions, right?

Anyway, the news (and I use that term ever so loosely) just wouldn’t let up about it. One show actually interviewed the mother of one of the girls with whom Tiger allegedly shared a Motel 6 evening. I’m guessing the network gave mom a couple hundred bucks as compensation for divulging the intimate details of her daughter’s life.

It does my heart good to see a family working together like that.

The upshot of all this is that people who had no interest in Tiger Woods the golfer have developed all kinds of interest in Tiger Woods the philanderer. He’s more famous than ever. If he decides to write a memoir detailing his experiences in the bedroom, he’ll be richer than ever.

And that, dear reader, gave me an idea. Like the Grinch’s plan to steal Christmas, it’s an awful idea, a wonderful awful idea! (It’s possible the idea formed because my shoes were too tight, or it could be that my head wasn’t screwed on just right. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that my wallet was two sizes too small.)

In an effort to remedy this diminutive wallet situation, I plan to announce to all the residents of Whoville that I have, in fact, had numerous affairs in the past five years.

I haven’t, but I plan to say that I have.

I intend to pay several cocktail waitresses, flight attendants and elderly Walmart greeters to claim they joined me in seedy, illicit trysts. Sure, it’s going to cost me plenty to convince these nice ladies to lie, but I’ll make that money up a hundred times over after my first appearance on Oprah.

After I’m absolutely sure everyone in America has heard about my nefarious liaisons, I’ll hold a press conference and tearfully declare how sorry I am. I also will use this moment to announce the publication of my upcoming book, “I Am So Sorry, America!” soon to be a major motion picture starring Jack Nicholson as Mike Taylor. Also starring Heather Graham, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon as the accommodating Walmart greeter. (I intend to hang around the set a lot during filming.)

I realize it’s going to take me a bit longer than it did Tiger to generate the media attention necessary to pull this off. After all, he’s Tiger Woods, I’m nobody. But I went golfing with my son four or five times this past summer and I’m getting pretty good. All I have to do is win a couple PGA tours. How hard can it be?

Watch for me on Oprah.

More Reality Check online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.mlive.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

It’s hard to be mysterious when your whole life is online

I’ve found someone.

There, I said it and I’m not sorry.

As many of you regular readers already know, I’ve been wife-less for just under a year now. The past ten months have been one long series of failed dates, flirtations, brief romances, and disastrous relationship maneuverings that I hope to never live through again.

Though my column during this time has occasionally veered into Carrie Bradshaw territory (the fictional columnist portrayed by Sarah Jessica Parker on “Sex in the City”), I am not an expert in relationships. In fact, when it comes to relationships, I am an idiot. Yes, I’m also an idiot about other things but we’re talking relationships here.

I can’t “read” women. I like them, but don’t understand them. Any man who thinks he does is an even bigger idiot than me, and that’s saying a lot.

So I’m glad to have found someone. Real glad. Even though she’s the sort of woman I understand least—intelligent, self-possessed, determined, confident, patient, beautiful … I could go on listing her attributes, which are legion, forever, but some of you would no doubt begin to feel a little nauseous. Sorry, new love makes people mushy and a bit tedious, except to each other. I’ll try to dial it back a notch so you won’t be tempted to toss your cookies here.

I’ve put off writing about her because to do so somehow makes the whole relationship “official,” at least in my mind. Once I share something with millions of readers (well, thousands, at least…maybe hundreds…OK, you 23 folks know who you are) it’s hard to turn back. If it doesn’t work out between us now, I’ll look like a fool, and not for the first time.

But it is going to work out. I love her, she loves me. I like her dad, I like her kids, I like her grandkids. I wish she had a better car, but true love rarely comes that neatly packaged.

In the time we’ve spent together, we’ve learned a lot about each other; favorite movies, religious preferences (both Catholic—whew!), favorite authors, shoe sizes, most embarrassing moments, and so on. I’ve found out quite a bit about her, and that’s good.

What’s bad is what she has found out about me. See, my life, for the past 20 years or so, has been chronicled in these columns, most of which are available online at various locations, like http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.mlive.com.

Over the years, I’ve written about my failed marriages, my inability to perform household repairs without incurring major injury, my inept management of financial affairs…every flaw I have is right there for anyone to see! And see she has.

I’m guessing it took her awhile to read through all those old columns, but she is nothing if not meticulous and systematic. Thanks to my online history, I have virtually no secrets from this woman!

You can imagine the disadvantage this puts me at. I would love to embellish my past in an effort to make myself sound better and more attractive than I really am, but nooooo, all she has to do is click that mouse and the truth is right there in black and white.

One keyword search for “love”, “marriage”, or “beer” and she knows more about me than I want her to.

It’s too late to change the past. But, just in case she stumbles on this column, I’d like to state for the record that I am an ex-astronaut who left NASA because the constant shuttle missions were taking too much time away from the management of my multi-million dollar estate and all the work I do with the homeless, orphans and abandoned puppies.

Honest.

More Reality Check online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.mlive.com. Email Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com. Fun LOCAL events covered by Mike Taylor online HERE!

Looking for love in robotic places

I’ve been lucky in love. Since turning 16, I’ve usually had a girlfriend, significant other, wife or lover. I’m not especially irresistible; but in my younger days, I was one of those guys willing to settle for whatever happened along. That, I’ve found, increases dramatically one’s chances for finding companionship, though not always suitable companionship.

Also, I played in a rock band. If you play in a rock band, even a bad one, you can get a girlfriend no matter how hideous you are. Quasimodo could have bagged Esmeralda if he’d traded the church bells for a drum kit.

Despite all that, there have been times in my life when I was sans a love interest, times when I was lonely. It happens to everyone and when it happened to me, I was as miserable as the next lonely guy.

But never, ever, did I consider the “solution” being marketed by Japanese toymaker Sega. Sega’s latest offering is—according to company executives—geared toward men over 20.

E.M.A. (pronounced “Emma”) is a 38-centemeter tall robot. Though only slightly larger than your average Barbie, and not nearly so realistically crafted or voluptuously, um, appointed, Emma is designed to interact “romantically” with her owner.

Emma blows kisses. Emma flirts. Emma dances seductively on a tabletop. Emma snuggles, or tries to; snuggling ain’t easy when you’re just over a foot tall and made of hard, blue and silver plastic.

E.M.A.—short for Eternal, Maiden, Actualization (which in Japan is considered “sexy talk,” apparently)—also sings romantic songs. Badly. But in the country that invented Karaoke, bad singing is a way of life. Emma’s just trying to fit in.

At any rate, executives at Sega seem to believe that Emma will sell like rice cakes—at just under $200 each—to lonely guys who have tired of the dating scene and just want a nice, plastic girl they can take home to mother (in a suitcase).

But maybe I shouldn’t poke fun. I, after all, am happily settled in with The Lovely Mrs. Taylor. And though Mrs. T doesn’t blow kisses, flirt or dance seductively on a tabletop (unless she’s had a couple margaritas) she does occasionally snuggle.

It’s easy to be a smart ass when you’re in a relationship. But if Mrs. Taylor did ever wise up and leave me for a tennis pro? Would I be tempted to purchase an Emma of my own?

Well, probably not. Not the Emma model, anyway. The technology’s still in its infancy, and let’s be real—Emma would never be your first choice for a blind date. Your buddy’s wife would describe her thus: “She’s a little plastic, but she has a cute face and a nice personality.”

And we all know what that means.

But once the folks at Sega get past the android Barbie phase of development and move into “Stepford Wives” territory, who knows?

I wonder if they’ll offer financing options.



More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

The Lovely Mrs. Taylor and me – a love story for the ages? Nah

Got a letter from a reader the other day – a Ms. C. Wymerotte of New York City, NY – inquiring after The Lovely Mrs. Taylor. I get a lot of mail like this; folks wanting to know if she’s real (yes), how long we’ve been married (15 years, last July), and whether she reads my column and thinks it’s funny (no, on both counts).

Ms. Wymerotte wanted to know how Mrs. T and I met.

Since Big Apple residents live life in the fast lane, and I hate to disappoint, I originally considered making something up; something interesting, romantic, exciting. But real life is rarely like that. Real life – as John Lennon put it – is what happens while we’re busy making other plans.

I was making other plans the night I met The Lovely Mrs. Taylor, who at the time was still known as “Julie.”

It was a Saturday night, and my little weekend band was playing a gig at a roadhouse north of Grand Rapids, the kind of place that smelled of old beer, Walmart perfume and deep fried chicken. The air was redolent with cigarette smoke; from the stage, I could barely make out the other side of the room.

Good ol’ boys in worn denim and girls with frosted pink lips jostled elbow-to-elbow on the dance floor, the girls dashing back to their warm Bud Lites and fuzzy navels whenever we threatened to play a slow tune.

We wrapped second set with a James Brown cover, clicked on the taped break music and worked our way through the crowd to the bar.

My buds grabbed their drinks and bee-lined to the band table, where waited bored wives and excited girlfriends.

I was solo, so I stood at the bar chatting with Danny the bartender, stirring my gin and tonic, trying to look cool, failing, and hoping against hope that some sweet young thang would mosey my way and say hello.

I’d had my eye on a cute redhead who had spent most of the previous set dancing in front of the stage, always a good sign. The redhead, however, now seemed to have her eye (and most of the rest of her) on a pumped-up dude in a cowboy hat and wife-beater T-shirt. I had to admit the shirt, hat and redhead all looked good on him.

I was turning back to the bar when a tall, willowy girl appeared at my side. It might have been the first time in my life I noticed the color of a woman’s eyes. Pale blue fading to grey, a November sky. Wavy chestnut hair spilled over her shoulders like water running downhill.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hey,” I said, stirring my drink, shooting for nonchalance, resolutely ignoring the sudden weakness in my knees.

“You guys are good,” she said.

We were not, but I said “Thanks” anyway.

“Do you know any AC/DC?” she asked.

We didn’t. Nobody in the band could sing the high notes. But I figured a girl this young and naïve wouldn’t know squat about AC/DC; she was just trying to make conversation a guy my age might be able to relate to.

“Now, how could we do any AC/DC?” I said, as if explaining one-digit addition to a third-grader. “We don’t even have a keyboard player.”

Neither does AC/DC, but I figured she wouldn’t know that.

She did. She looked at me as if she’d found me stuck to the bottom of her shoe upon leaving the restroom. Then without a word, she turned and walked back to her table. She was sitting with her older sister. She leaned over and said something to her sister and they both laughed.

Years later, I learned what that “something” was: “That guy is the biggest (expletive deleted) I’ve ever met.”

What can I say? Mrs. Taylor was an excellent judge of character even then.

For my part, I thought she was an effete, stuck-up little princess. But that didn’t make my knees any less weak or her eyes any less blue.

A week later, we were dating. Opposites and all that. It took a long time to get past our initial impressions of each other, which were partly right, mostly wrong.

And as the years passed, our rough edges wore away, like two pieces of cracked marble colliding in a rock tumbler, until at last nothing much remains but smooth, beautiful stone.

Oh, we’re still opposites, I suppose, but lordy, how we do attract.

That’s my “how we met” story. Now, you tell me yours. Send your tales of courtship to: Mike Taylor, c/o Valley Media, Inc., PO Box 9, Jenison, MI 49429 or via e-mail to mtaylor325@gmail.com. I’ll include the best of them in a future column! More Reality Check online at http://realitycheck.shoutpost.com.