Spilling My Guts

  
 People of my generation have a fondness for radio. So when the makers of radio for the digital age contacted us to participate in the production of a podcast, we were favorably disposed.  The subject was Operation Match, the prototype of online dating that emerged in 1966. Anita and I met through this new selection process. (See the blog posting, "The 50th" above).  An audio person came to our house, and set up equipment for an interview with  Emanuele Berry, a producer in New York for Gimlet Media.  Their program being developed is called Afterwords.  The interview was conducted via telephone with Emanuele in NYC.

   It was a long gab but a good one.  I was comfortable in my own house, and that may have led me into some inadvertent and unwise disclosure.  Many of the questions focused on our first date.  Anita's answers were objective descriptions of where, when and how.  They were specific but not overly personal.  When asked why we were compatible, we agreed that our  interest in our college majors--English--was the initial common ground.  I recalled picking her up at her dance rehearsal.  Before we even spoke, I was able to take a seat and reason which dancer was Anita Grimes.  Not difficult since I knew she was a young female, and I knew the color of her hair and she had told me on the phone that it would be in a pony tail.  So I focused on that dancer, unsettled a bit by the male partner she was with who was engineering a slithering slide against his body as her descent from a high lift.  Then I remembered that she had mentioned the male dancers in her troupe were gay.  My mind unclenched.

   As we reminisced and laughed we were back at Tiny Naylor's coffee shop in Sherman Oaks, CA after the rehearsal, passionately discussing the writings of Hopkins and Carlyle.  Then I realized--back in present time--that I had spoken the names of the writers into the oversize microphone in-co-rec-a-tely, referring to Carlyle as William not Thomas.  And this inexcusable shameful flub had been spoken to an internet audience!  Anita had to pick up the slack with the interviewer while I groped for my scattered brain cells.  Little did I know that a far more shocking marconian miscue was poised to pounce.

   My underwear. Say what? quoth the voice in my head.  When I went to meet Anita I remember what I donned after skivvies and socks.  At age 23 I was already on the way to becoming a person of girth.  And thus I was a bit nervous about first impressions.  So I obtained a male corset to ameliorate my adipose accumulation. Yes, a male corset--to make me look less fat.  If I had kept that recollection in memory all would have been well, but instead I voiced it to the interviewer, and to a yet to be determined audience of podcast listeners from one end of cyberspace to the other.  Wider, I'm told, than from sea to shining sea.  Is this not the epitome of TMI?

   I need to have myself seen to.  I need to find a lean-to, well out of sight.  I will fill it with soft straw.  It is time to withdraw and to wane.  Weary and worn am I, enervated by spilling my guts.