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Logic | Oct 18 2001

On the subject of notes left for desirable women in strange places, twelve years ago I stood in a kitchen at a party in Chicago with my friend Mickle, who wanted desperately to leave a note for the host of the party, a woman he had known, barely, in college, and who may have, he’d recently learned, admired him back then, in college, and who now lived with a man who was possibly her boyfriend.

We were drunk and being pressured by whomever was giving us a ride home to hurry the fuck up.

Mickle’s note invited the woman to attend a play he’d written, only in his haste he inverted the names so that the note appeared to have composed by the woman herself, inviting Mickle to see a play that she had written. This was both regrettable and perplexing, a regrettable and perplexing mistake, but still it seemed less significant than the task of finding a place to leave the note so that it would be found by the woman and not by her possible boyfriend.

It was panicked moment made worse by Mickle’s drunken conviction that this was his one and only chance to act.

I was no help.

What would you have suggested? It is a puzzle.

Mickle opened the refrigerator, surveyed its contents, and placed the note in a tub of lowfat cream cheese. His logic: Possible boyfriends don’t eat lowfat cream cheese.

And he was right. The woman found the note, attended his play, got together with him, broke up with him (or he her; I forget), married someone else, divorced this someone else, got back together with Mickle, and now, twelve years after finding the note (forgive me that I do not know how long it took her to find it, nor what she thought on finding it; nor anything, really), has consented to marry him.