Chicken Soup for the Soul

[Deleted]

Shalamar said:

I am ashamed to confess that one of those stories really got to me until I thought about it a bit more. It was the one about the guy who was to meet a blind date on the corner, and he was told that she'd be wearing a red carnation. When he showed up, the only woman who fit the description was at least 20 years older than he. Swallowing his disappointment, he asked her where she'd like to have dinner, only to be told "Son, I'm not the woman you're waiting for. She's in that cafe over there. She wanted to find out what kind of man you were, and now she knows, and here she comes!" Happy ending, flowers, violins, etc.

I actually thought that was sweet - until, as I said, I thought about it. "So, let me get this straight - that woman went up to an older woman and said "Yo, put on this carnation and pretend to be me, because you're old. If that guy still wants to boink you, he's the man for me!" Yeesh.

That's an old urban legend-I think Snopes covered it.

[swanflake]

I was on a competitive speech team for two years in high school, and I heard so many recitations of these stories--ugggh. At one competition, a girl at my school beat me out of making the finals, and she read a Chicken Soup for the Soul story, and I read something by Eric Bogosian. And I looked at the ordinals (three judges for the round)--I got two second place ordinals and one sixth (six people were in the round--three made the final)--she got one third place, one fourth place, and a first. We looked at our Judge's Ballots afterward, and the judge who ranked me sixth was the same one who ranked her first, and on her ballot he wrote nothing about her actual performance, but just some dribble about how inspiring her selection was and how much he loves all those books. On my ballot he kept going on about how he felt it was inappropriate that I said the word "ass". Motherfucker.