Director’s Notes: Episodes 275 - Date Night

A few years ago, I started dating again, after 20 years of being in a relationship. Try to imagine, if you will, the difference between dating in 2001 and 2021. Way back in the day, I used Yahoo! Personals, and I felt really weird about it. Like, who on earth uses the internet to find people to go out with?

But I managed a couple of uneventful dates back then. Uneventful, meaning no deep connections came from those nights out, but also no unnecessary drama. Years later, there's the slew of dating apps with all kinds of angles for how you want to date, and most of you don't need me to tell you this, but what a white-knuckle ride it was.

I'm currently seeing someone, which has kept me off those apps for several months, and I'm thankful for this. Primarily, I'm thankful for a lovely girlfriend (Sarah) who likes books and theater and good food and puts up with my enjoyment of horror movies.

But I kind of miss the apps. I'm not interested in dating anyone else, I just miss the wild ride that is 21st Century dating, and so I thought I'd share with you one of my favorite stories. (Though, it was not amusing at the time).

I went on a first date with (not her real name) Chloe. We met at a lodge near Woodstock on a beautiful fall afternoon. We had hot toddies and talked about theater and travel. She mentioned to me that she recently became Celiac. "Oh no!" I said. "I didn't know you could develop that later in life." She said you could (and this is apparently true!).

I asked her how she found out. Like, did she feel awful and have to go to a doctor, or worse, an ER for treatment. No, she said. She self-diagnosed. Whenever she has wheat (or wheat-by-products?) she feels awful. I didn't say it out loud, but I thought, that sounds like gluten intolerance, not Celiac Disease. But I don't know. I'm not going to Google it in front of her.

Anyway, we decided to go out again. She picked a bar in town to meet at. When I arrived, I was checking out their cocktail menu (great stuff), but their food menu was all gluten. Even the house salad had croutons in it. I figured when she arrived, we could have a drink and then pick another place to eat.

I waited. She texted. She was running late, because she had to wire money to someone in France. She didn't get specific. But it was to pay off a debt her brother had incurred? Chloe ended up being a full hour late. Fine.

I told her about the menu, and she suggested the new sushi place down the street. Perfect!

The sushi place was packed, but they had space at the bar for 2. We checked out the drink menu. I pointed out one of the cocktails as looking particularly good. "It has whiskey in it," she said. "You can't have whiskey?" I asked. "No," she said, "because of the gluten"

Aside: First off, no it doesn't. It's distilled. Second off, what did she think were in the hot toddies we had at the lodge the other day?

Chloe asked the bartender about sake and whether it has gluten. No, he said. And then he asked if she were Celiac. She said yes, and he said he would alert the chef.

We ordered sake and then placed our sushi orders. A couple minutes later, the chef himself came up to us with a handwritten list of what we could order that would be guaranteed to have zero contact with anything gluten. Sadly, certain rolls had sesame seeds and/or mock crab in them, and those packages did not guarantee a gluten free environment.

Still, he gave us a long list of salmon, tuna, shrimp, eel, etc rolls that we could order from, and Chloe looked disappointed.

"I can't have any of these," she said.

"Wait. Why not," I asked.

"I don't like fish," she said.

"…," I said.

But you… you chose this place. This… sushi place. Sushi, famous for being fish-based. Am I crazy?

I didn't say any of that. We finished our date and never went out again.

About a year later, I'm talking to some artist woman at a party telling her this story, and she tells me that when she was single that she used to play a character on dates. She considered dating to be a kind of performance art. And she met her husband on one of these dates, and it turned out they were both playing ridiculous characters and they fell in love over it.

I'm hoping Chloe is a performance artist, or at minimum still enjoys a hot toddy from time to time.

-Jeffrey Cranor

Oct 1, 2025

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