Where to take Internet date

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Where to take Internet date				August 11, 2007

Last week I got a cyber beam from my friend Liputia. Actually, I’ve never met Liputia, so I suppose I can’t call her my friend, though her beam was so warm and fuzzy that it’s hard to believe we haven’t been intimate pals for years.

As it turns out, Liputia is a lonely girl looking for love in all the wrong places, and she virtually begged me to click on a link that would take me to a gallery of revealing pictures. If I liked her pics, we could move to Stage 2 and cure her loneliness.

I have to admit that I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for women who are so lonely that they have to resort to e-mailing anonymous men and plastering pictures of themselves on the Internet. But what really attracted me to Liputia was the subject line of her cry for compassion: “fried wheelbarrow.”

What on earth, I wondered, was a fried wheelbarrow, and how did it fit in with Liputia’s call for companionship?

I suppose you could call some wheelbarrow that’s been left out in Williamsburg’s recent heat wave “fried,” but what’s that got to do with sexy pictures and a potential dating game?

Then it dawned on me that Liputia was messing with my brain. It also occurred to me that Liputia was no ordinary dull sex kitten, since she obviously had delved deeply into Anglo-Saxon and knew that “barrow” was the word for a castrated male hog.

That was it! Liputia’s subject line involved a cryptic test for her prospective date. Anyone who thought that her fried wheelbarrow involved the barrow with handles that you truck stuff around in would fail. No, what she really wanted someone to figure out was that she desperately craved a place that served up takeout (wheeled) fried pork chops.

Well, I thought, I could certainly handle that. Even if I couldn’t find any local fast food joint that offered fried pork chops, I could fry them myself and off we’d go, pork chops in hand, for a fine evening on the town. But where to go?

Obviously I couldn’t take a girl of Liputia’s intellectual suavity just anywhere.

It occurred to me that we might go to one of the offerings at William & Mary’s Shakespeare Festival, though I’m not a big fan of Shakespeare’s fluffier works. Or we could go to see Joe Orton’s “What the Butler Saw.” But then I read in the Last Word an apparent spoof about how the play was riddled with sexual innuendoes and degeneracy, so I crossed that off the list. I had read all of Orton’s plays at one point and found them rather cleverly constructed, but perhaps I had missed something that an experienced filth ferret like Orton himself or a more astute theatergoer would pick up on. And Liputia, if anything, was astute.

Almost on the verge of despairing that Williamsburg was simply not the culture crux of the universe, I suddenly recalled that the Lake Matoaka Amphitheater had been renovated and was now open for business. Excellent, I thought. After a makeover costing more than $7 million, this had to be the place to go.

As part of the pitch for the amphitheater, we had been promised that serious drama, Jamestown reminiscences and even the Pittsburgh Symphony might well find their way to Williamsburg. What better cultural experiences than those could you hope for? Besides, the outdoor setting would offer a perfect venue to munch on our fried pork chops while we listened to some Debussy or Dvorak.

So what if the heat index was approaching 104? Who cares, as long as one is being transported to a symphonic Nirvana by a first-rate orchestra?

Coincidentally, on the same day that I got Liputia’s beam, I met my buddy Moose in the sauna at the rec center. Turns out that Moose and his girlfriend Misty had been to the amphitheater the night before. This rather surprised me, since Moose and Misty are not what you would call culture vultures. But there they were, and I soon learned why.

To begin with, the entrance fee was only a slim six bucks. But what really got Moose to the amphitheater was the lure of beer and wine, which went for $2.50 a clip. However, if you bought a string of beer tickets, the price for a brew was considerably reduced.

Fifteen beers later, Moose, Misty and the other boozewads had no idea what they were listening to, though Moose, who said the sun was in his eyes the whole time, conjectured that it was some band from the college. So snockered were they by the time they left that they took a taxi home and picked up Moose’s car the next day.

I was devastated. There was no way I was going to take Liputia to a place crawling with blitzed drunks and winos listening to some cacophonous kiddy band.

Maybe some day the plans for a true performing arts center will be floated again around here. Until then, I’ll just have to put Liputia on hold and hope that she doesn’t find someone else who figures out that she lusts for fried pork chops.