"I'm cute! I'm cuuuuute!"
The Rankin-Bass "Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer" Christmas special just wrecked me as a kid. Or at least, that's what I was told. I don't remember any of this, but according to Mom, the first time I saw the show, three year old me spent the entire night crying my eyes out. Apparently I was crushed because "The other reindeers were so mean to Rudolph!" (Yes, I said "rein-deers". Cut me some slack! I was an agitated toddler.)
But at least Rudolph got some redemption. Even though his ungulate peers were treating him like crap, Clarice, the cutest of all the girl reindeer living at the North Pole, actually found him attractive. She wasn't repulsed by his differences, she was drawn to them. Rudolph got a girlfriend not by hiding his true nature, but by being his all-natural freaky self.
As I got older, and girls went from being icky to being interesting, I prayed to God up in His merciful Heaven, that if He could provide a girlfriend for Rudolph, a lousy puppet, then maybe, just maybe, He could also make one for me, a kid who reveled in being his all-natural freaky self.
Spoiler alert: He didn't.
The years dragged on, and though my school environments transitioned from elementary to middle to senior, my attempts to woo the ladies were consistently less than successful. Every time I tried to lure a girl, or a young woman, or a teacher (it's never too late to pick up the phone, Mrs. Kauffman...) into my weak, bony arms, they made it abundantly clear that my lascivious intentions were not reciprocated. Valentine's Day cards and flowers were tossed in the trash. Love letters were read out loud on the bus to a raucous reception. Two girls I actually dated at the end of my senior year eventually revealed, independently of each other, that they were only using me to make their exes jealous. I mean, come on... two women did the same thing to me within the span of three months?!? What are the odds?
For a while, this constant female abuse didn't bother me. But after so much rejection, even the most self-assured person is going to begin to doubt themselves. And doubt myself I did. Parsing all the evidence in front of me, it became pretty clear: I must be supremely ugly. So as college loomed, I figured I was never going to find any sort of female companionship. A decade of total girlfriend failure, in concert with my very visible genetic failings, made my prospects seem hopeless.
Little did I know that my fortunes were on the verge of a seismic change. Unbeknownst to me, I was about to become the name-above-the-title star in my own real-life 80s romantic comedy, a college love story jam-packed with all the prerequisite cliches. The accidental meet-cute! The rapid-fire jokes! The inevitable second-act complications! And the most crucial ingredient of all: the slow-motion first kiss, a heart-pounding moment soundtracked by the Southern jangle pop greatness of...
LET'S ACTIVE.
After spending twelve school years interacting with basically the same group of kids, being dropped into my college's diverse community was eye-opening. I found myself in the midst of a human cornucopia teeming with brand-new-to-me female pulchritude. Even though I was a small ugly fish in a big hotness pond, I shook off my self-defeating grade school mindset. There just had to be a girl somewhere on campus for me. The hunt was on!
In my dorm, there was this one blond German girl with big bright eyes (big eyes are my kryptonite) who sported a skimpy pair of terry cloth shorts, but I may as well have been day-old strudel, she was so disinterested. Then when I turned my clumsy attentions to my friend Nancy's punk-y, New Wave-y roommate, she made it clear we were better off as friends. Finally, my attempt to woo a classmate who was strapped into a shoulder-to-waist fiberglass back brace resulted in my very first "it's not you, it's me" brush-off. (To add insult to injury, just days later, I saw her shambling across the quad hand-in-hand with a slovenly six-foot-four loose meat sandwich of a guy.) And that was it, romance-wise, for the remainder of my very first semester of college. Pathetic, huh?
So I started the spring semester of 1985 right back where I found myself at the end of high school: feeling unattractive, undesirable, and unloved, doing my best to come to grips with the fact that I was never going to have a girlfriend, ever.
Then I met “Daria”.
During one of our dorm's weekly multi-floor keg parties, I discovered my roommate's step-brother and a couple of other people hanging out in the dark in my room. As I was grabbing my coat and book bag, trying not to interrupt, one of the girls broke off her conversation and turned my way. In the hallway light spilling over my shoulder, I could see that she had a spiky blond bob, big bright eyes (again with the eyes!), and an amazing smile. A smile that was both warmly welcoming, and yet subtly mysterious at the same time. Our gazes synchronized for a second or two... and then it was over. She went back to her group chat, and I closed the door on them as I left for the computer lab. (On a Saturday night, no less. Neeeeerd!)
Despite our ephemeral interaction, and the fact that we didn't even say one word to each other, I couldn't get her out of my mind. Not to put too fine a point on it, but... holy smokes, she was the hottest woman I'd ever seen in my life! For days after our two nanosecond staring contest, whether I was in class, or in lab, or in the gym, she overwhelmed my thoughts. And I didn't even know her name! She was just "that blond", a random person I figured I'd never see again.
A couple of weeks later, however, as I was coming back from the dining hall... there she was again, hanging with some fellow dorm residents. Somehow, I joined the conversation. Somehow, I found out her name. Somehow, I made her laugh a couple of times.
And then, somehow... we spent the entire evening together.
Most of the details of that night are lost to time, but what I do remember is that Daria and I prowled around campus for hours, exploring every hidden corner and unlocked building, getting to know each other in the process. It turned out she went to another nearby college, and had found her way into the Alexander social scene through my roommate's step-brother having been a suitemate of her ex-boyfriend. She was super-smart. She was incredibly well-read. She was devilishly snarky. She was undeniably attractive. Daria was the real deal, a well-rounded human being wrapped in a beautiful package.
It wasn't until we stumbled back to my dorm sometime around 2 AM that we realized we were very nearly frozen solid. The two of us had been so wrapped up in our mutual admiration society, we ignored the fact that we'd been out in the frigid North Carolina winter night for hours. When we hit the small lobby, shivering, we hastily curled up next to the clanging, rattling radiator to warm up.
As we laid there, just inches from each other, my mind was spinning. I desperately debated whether or not I should try to kiss her. I didn't have a lot of "first move" experience, and I was incredibly intimidated by how awesome she was. So I pretty much just remained inert on the carpet like a dead trout, staring at her all googly-eyed.
Then that smile of hers suddenly reappeared, that wry grin that hinted of something she knew that I didn't. Before I could even work up the nerve to ask her what she was thinking... she kissed me.
Let me reiterate: she kissed me. The ugly duckling. The hapless bait dog that had been used to rile up old boyfriends. The nerdy Mr. Cellophane that couldn't get tipsy dorm girls interested in him. This amazing woman went for me.
And for you hopeless romantics out there, you'll be happy to know that the date of this big event in my relationship history was February 14th. Valentine's Day. For the first time, my romantic overtures didn't wind up in the trash.
<<<photo of ME IN COLLEGE>>>
My brother Jon and I, Christmas 1984. Just a few weeks before my first real romance! (Thanks to Dad for the crappy Polariod.)
Over the next few weeks, Daria and I were together all the time. She introduced me to Sadlack's, the cool counter-culture sandwich shop across the street from the campus bell tower. She influenced me to start dabbling in creative writing. In between all this goofing off, we got in a considerable amount of making out. Although we never formally recognized our relationship as such, in my feeble mind, I finally had a real, honest-to-goodness "girlfriend".
But all of that awesomeness was eclipsed a mere week into our togetherness, when she gave me the greatest gift I'd ever received: my very first mixtape.
My meager collection of cassettes was all store-bought, so to hold in my hands a set of songs made by another human being just for me was gobsmacking. The thing is, though, because she was much more plugged into current non-Top 40 music than I was, the songs Daria chose to share were... well, they were different. To be honest, they confused me. As I've mentioned before, despite that New Wave punk girl I mentioned earlier playing a little Throbbing Gristle and Birdsong Of The Mesozoic for me, I was a complete stranger to anything "indie". My musical vision was restricted to standard rock and pop structures. Step outside those boundaries, and you might as well be speaking Swahili. Daria didn't just step outside my boundaries, though... she propelled me on a Jesse Owens-worthy leap deep into unknown musical territory.
Right out of the gate, the very first song was a head-scratcher. The whole thing from beginning to end sounded chaotic. It shifted rhythms on a whim. The guitars weren't your standard buzzsaw rock axes, they had this ringing, chiming tone that was unlike anything I'd heard before. Daria loved the band's "chirpy", as she put it, co-ed vocals. But as much as I tried to get into it, it just puzzled me. I mean, the song's title alone was confusing: "Easy Does". Easy Does What? And the band's name didn't help matters: Let's Active. Let's Do What To Be Active? There were so many prepositions and adverbs and nouns missing!
I was head over heels for Daria, so I really tried my best to wrap my brain around what she told me was her current favorite band. I even walked over to Schoolkids Records to check out Cypress, the album from which “Easy Does” had sprung. But that didn't help, because the cover was an Impressionistic explosion of color and thick strokes that made my sixth grade masterpiece “Springtime On Jupiter” look like a classic Norman Rockwell painting. Try as I might, I just couldn't appreciate “Easy Does”. I couldn't appreciate Let's Active. I wasn't musically mature enough.
Just what every young woman wants in a man. (Thanks to Nancy Skinkle for the embarrassing photo.)
That stunning lack of maturity was to cause more problems than just sharing music, however. Barely a month into our whirlwind romance, a so-called friend did his best jealous Iago routine, pouring poisoned words into both Daria's ears and mine. Because we were too young and dumb (I'll leave it to you to figure out which of those I was) to fully process what was going on, all the spiteful subterfuge created too much ill will from which to recover. I was hurt. She was hurt. And that was that. We were a couple no more.
To return to my ham-fisted 80s sex comedy analogy: Daria and I hit our second act complication... and then the film broke. Our movie came to a premature, unsatisfying end. There would be no third act resolution. No happily ever after as the credits roll. Instead, the lights came up, and the crowd angrily surged out to the lobby to get their money back from the manager.
When I was packing up my stuff at the end of that semester, my first tumultuous year of college finally over, I remember standing over the trash can with Daria's mixtape in my hands. I was so hurt, I just wanted to toss it, to be rid of her forever. But... I didn't. I slipped it into my tape case, and it went home with me for the summer. And that was, for all intents and purposes, how my first college romance came to its sad end.
Except... it didn't end. Not really. And not in the way you might think.
Writing this column is interesting. Flipping through the mental scrapbook of memories I've accumulated over the years, I find myself making connections and coming to realizations I'd never contemplated before. Take one of my previous installments, for instance, in which I waxed rhapsodic about how Love Junk by The Pursuit Of Happiness started me on the path to indie rock and indie pop fanaticism. As I started jotting down notes for this particular article, however it became painfully clear that (gasp) I was wrong! TPOH wasn't my “first”. It turns out Daria's influence hadn't completely ended with our breakup, because I had been enjoying indie rock for years as an “I've finally seen the light!” fan of Let's Active.
See, even though I spent a fun summer dating Pizza Girl and enjoying classic synth pop, “Easy Does” wouldn't stop echoing inside my skull. The more I listened to it, the more I realized it wasn't odd... it was a damn good song! My staid, boring, vanilla pop sensibilities had been shaken up by band leader Mitch Easter's unique style of Southern indie rock, a brand-new genre the critics dubbed “jangle pop”. And thanks to rewinding "Easy Does" over and over and over in the computer lab during the following semesters, clumsily bopping along to the tune as I hammered out Pascal modules in the wee hours of the morning, I had became a fan.
So much of a fan, in fact, that I added not only Cypress, but their first EP Afoot, and the even-better followup album Big Plans For Everybody, to my precious music collection. “Blue Line”, “Every Word Means No”, “Room With A View”, and “In Little Ways” were all top-shelf songs. But when I needed a Let's Active fix, I always started with “Easy Does”.
I hadn't realized it at the time, but due to her pushing me out of my comfort zone, Daria and her eclectic tastes subconsciously prepared me for the likes of The Pursuit Of Happiness, My Bloody Valentine, Jellyfish, R.E.M., Matthew Sweet, and pretty much every indie band that came after.
Let's Active were there first, though. And four decades later, sitting here at my computer hammering out screenplays instead of source code, I'm still clumsily bopping along to their indie rock gems.
The inner sleeve of Cypress. As a child of the South, this photo overcomes me with childhood nostalgia.
An appreciation for indie rock wasn't the only gift that Daria left me with, however. A year and change after our unfortunate ending, we ran into each other at the annual Gelo-Monster, a big party my friend threw every fall at his family's dairy farm in Virginia. After a few awkward moments of feeling each other out, Daria and I spent a great deal of time just talking. By the end of the evening, with all our old hurts erased, I realized how much I'd missed Daria's presence in my life. We weren't going to be a couple... too much time had passed for that. But we were definitely friends again.
Thanks to Daria, for the first time in my life, I'd actually done a mature thing: I'd repaired a fractured relationship. She helped me on the road towards having constructive, proactive confrontations. And I've carried that "get over it" lesson with me into the present day (supplanted a great deal thanks to the personal growth I've experienced with my life partner Suzie), swallowing my pride and my fears to reconnect with all the important people I'd lost contact with because of time, geography, or - like with Daria - youthful stupidity. (If you guessed earlier that I was the “dumb” one... you win!) My stable of friends is now very solid, and very intact.
Finally - and most importantly - Daria gave me, as The Kids call it, “game”. She was the first woman who didn't see me as a troglodytic bowl-haired string bean, she was really and authentically turned on by me. Because of Daria's genuine attraction, I felt confident enough in who I was and what I had to offer to make the attempt, however clumsy and slobbery, to chat up every woman I dated after her. Experiencing that first taste of "maybe I'm not so hideous" enabled me to successfully court Pizza Girl, The Teacher, and all the other women who led me to where I am today: happily entwined for all time with Suzie.
Still, just because I know in my heart I'm not totally worthless, that doesn't mean that circumstances don't wear down my resolve at times. No matter how tough you are, there are points in your life when you need a little validation from the people closest to you, a little boost to get your head back in the game.
That happens every once and a while, when it becomes painfully clear that I am no longer the lithe stud muffin that Daria lustily seduced in front of the lobby radiator, but instead a post-middle-aged monster who bursts into tears every time he catches sight of his image in a reflective surface. Whatever slender slice of time in which I could have been even partially considered "hot" is officially over and done with. Most days I feel outright hideous, and that's all there is to it.
But when I'm thinking I'm too grotesque to be seen with in public, that I'm too Elephant Man-esque to love, that I'm plain ugly as sin... Suzie will hit me with those big hazel eyes of hers (wow, my "eye thing" is really a thing), flash me that stunning smile, and place a loving kiss on my popcorn-dusted cheek. When that happens, everything is better. In a flash, I feel like that little antlered outcast Rudolph. I'm elatedly soaring into the bright blue SoCal sky, yelling to the world...
"I'm cute! I'm cuuuuute!"
BIO
Don Stroud is not the famous actor and world-class surfer of the same name. He is the non-famous California transplant who became an award-winning screenwriter and film editor. He loves cats, sushi, comic books, movies, music, and Cherry Coke. What's that, dear? Oh yes: and his long-suffering wife. You can follow his ramblings on Twitter and Instagram.