By A.J. Llewellyn
I had an interesting...no, bizarre is the right word...experience yesterday. I have recently befriended a very attractive young woman who is an actress. I liked her and we hit it off. She is a golf fanatic and apparently, a very good player. She is also a tennis buff and avid reader. Though fully immersed in her career, I was impressed that she is not the starving actress type. She has museum memberships and drives a nice car. She reads great books, dresses well, she has invested previous earnings. She attends classes, she auditions constantly and recently landed a big TV commercial. I was thrilled to see it show up time and again on the air and I nursed her through a bad patch where she lost a major ad to a big name.
She threw it off, impressing me with her strength and strong self-worth.
My new friend was so awesome, so gorgeous, I began to wonder...why was she single and alone?
It was a question that intrigued me and I asked, as nicely as I could over coffee one morning and she laughed, saying she only seems to meet married men.
She confessed to a fling here and there but said she was looking for the right guy. I happened to know a guy, newly-divorced and thought they would be gorgeous together. My friend, let's call him Tom, met her on Saturday for coffee. Their date went so well, he invited her to the theater that night and called me from his cell phone in the men's restroom, gushing.
"A.J! She's amazing. She's bright, she's beautiful and soooo sweet."
They enjoyed the play, their observations on it remarkably similar.
Over a late dinner afterward, then dessert someplace else, she played with his shoes, tying the laces together. He said he felt like a kid again and never laughed so hard. He said it was wonderful.
He called her when he got home and they talked for two hours. He begged her to have dinner with him on Sunday and she agreed.
He took her to his favorite, very expensive Italian restaurant, where his best friends all waited like circling sharks. He saw the shock on their faces and thought they were jealous.
Things went very well, though Tom said the guys kept staring at her.
My actress friend excused herself for a moment and as soon as she left the table, his friends pounced on him.
He heard the immortal words, "Tom, what are you doing with a call girl?"
One of the guys claimed to have slept with her, the others had seen her picture online.
"She picked me up at a bar a few weeks ago. She acts like she doesn't remember," Tom's friend said. "But she is a call girl. She's with So-and-So agency."
Tom called me early yesterday morning, deeply upset after enduring an appalling evening where The Actress clearly worked hard to be the perfect dinner date, charming, if you'll pardon the pun, the pants off everybody.
He desperately wanted the meal to be over so he could go online and check whether she really was a rent girl.
Poor Tom was in torment.
Like a teenage girl, he raced home and googled The Actress by her 'porn' name. There's nothing nasty out there. No naked pics. It's all very discreet but she IS who they say she is.
He forwarded me the link and when I read her bio,
I love sex being the first line, I felt dreadful.
Tom blamed me until he realized I too, had been naive to her truth.
He has dropped her like a hot brick, not letting on what he has learned. He has asked me to say nothing to her, just that he decided it wouldn't work.
She called him once, but has not turned, you know, fatal.
I struggle with what to say to her because I, the dummy, set them up and she keeps asking why he stopped calling her.
I want to tell her, but I can't. I feel my friendship with him has been harmed and my friendship with her is like a shell game.
She never mentioned what she does. I would never have set her up with Tom, but I sure would have felt a lot better about her had I known the truth.
So now, I know she really is an Actress, and I wish I didn't know that particular truth.
Aloha oe,
A.J.
