Dave Barry: Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up

As a mature adult, I feel an obligation to help the younger generation, just as the mother fish guards her unhatched eggs, keeping her lonely vigil day after day, never leaving her post, not even to go to the bathroom, until her tiny babies emerge and she is able, at last, to eat them. “She may be your mom, but she’s still a fish” is a wisdom nugget that I would pass along to any fish eggs reading this column.

But today I want to talk about dating. This subject was raised in a letter to me from a young person named Eric Knott, who writes:

I have got a big problem. There’s this girl in my English class who is really good-looking. However, I don’t think she knows I exist. I want to ask her out, but I’m afraid she will say no, and I will be the freak of the week. What should I do?

Eric, you have sent your question to the right mature adult, because as a young person I spent a lot of time thinking about this very problem. Starting in about eighth grade, my time was divided as follows:

Academic Pursuits: 2 percent. Zits: 16 percent. Trying to Figure Out How to Ask Girls Out: 82 percent.

The most sensible way to ask a girl out is to walk directly up to her on foot and say, “So, you want to go out? Or what?” I never did this. I knew, as Eric Knott knows, that there was always the possibility that the girl would say no, thereby leaving me with no viable option but to leave Harold C. Crittenden Junior High School forever and go into the woods and become a bark-eating hermit whose only companions would be the gentle and understanding woodland creatures.

“Hey, ZITFACE!” the woodland creatures would shriek in cute little Chip ‘n’ Dale voices while raining acorns down upon my head. “You wanna DATE? HAHAHAHAHAHA.”

So the first rule of dating is: Never risk direct contact with the girl in question. Your role model should be the nuclear submarine, gliding silently beneath the ocean surface, tracking an enemy target that does not even begin to suspect that the submarine would like to date it. I spent the vast majority of 1960 keeping a girl named Judy under surveillance, maintaining a minimum distance of 50 lockers to avoid the danger that I might somehow get into a conversation with her, which could have led to disaster:

JUDY: Hi. ME: Hi. JUDY: JUST in case you have ever thought about having a date with me, the answer is no. WOODLAND CREATURES: HAHAHAHA.

The only problem with the nuclear-submarine technique is that it’s difficult to get a date with a girl who has never, technically, been asked. This is why you need Phil Grant. Phil was a friend of mine who had the ability to talk to girls. It was a mysterious superhuman power he had, comparable to X-ray vision. So, after several thousand hours of intense discussion and planning with me, Phil approached a girl he knew named Nancy, who approached a girl named Sandy, who was a direct personal friend of Judy’s and who passed the word back to Phil via Nancy that Judy would be willing to go on a date with me. This procedure protected me from direct humiliation, similar to the way President Reagan was protected from direct involvement in the Iran-contra scandal by a complex White House chain of command that at one point, investigators now believe, included his horse.

Thus it was that, finally, Judy and I went on an actual date, to see a movie in White Plains, New York. If I were to sum up the romantic ambience of this date in four words, those words would be: “My mother was driving.” This made for an extremely quiet drive, because my mother, realizing that her presence was hideously embarrassing, had to pretend she wasn’t there. If it had been legal, I think she would have got out and sprinted alongside the car, steering through the window. Judy and I, sitting in the backseat about 75

feet apart, were also silent, unable to communicate without the assistance of Phil, Nancy, and Sandy.

After what seemed like several years we got to the movie theater, where my mother went off to sit in the Parents and Lepers Section. The movie was called North to Alaska, but I can tell you nothing else about it because I spent the whole time wondering whether it would be necessary to amputate my right arm, which was not getting any blood flow as a result of being perched for two hours like a petrified snake on the back of Judy’s seat exactly one molecule away from physical contact.

So it was definitely a fun first date, featuring all the relaxed spontaneity of a real-estate closing, and in later years I did regain some feeling in my arm. My point, Eric Knott, is that the key to successful dating is self-confidence. I bet that good-looking girl in your English class would LOVE to go out with you. But YOU have to make the first move. So just do it! Pick up that phone! Call Phil Grant.

Recently I was watching TV, and a commercial came on, and the announcer, in a tone of voice usually reserved for major developments in the Persian Gulf, said: “Now consumers can ask Angela Lansbury their questions about Bufferin!”

As a normal human, your natural reaction to this announcement is: “Huh?” Meaning: “What does Angela Lansbury have to do with Bufferin?” But this commercial featured several consumers who had apparently been stopped at random on the street, and every one of them had a question for Angela Lansbury about Bufferin. Basically what they asked was, “Miss Lansbury, is Bufferin a good product that I should purchase, or what?” These consumers seemed very earnest. It was as if they had been going around for months wringing their hands and saying, “I have a question about Bufferin! If only I could ask Angela Lansbury!”

What we are seeing here is yet another example of a worsening problem that has been swept under the rug for too long in this nation: the invasion of Consumers from Mars. They look like humans, but they don’t act like humans, and they are taking over. Don’t laugh. We know that Mars can support life. We know this because Vice President for Now Dan Quayle, who is the administration’s No. 1 Man in the space program, once made the following famous statement, which I am not making up:

“Mars is essentially in the Same orbit ... somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.”

You cannot argue with that kind of logic. You can only carry it to its logical conclusion, which is that if there are canals, that means there are boats, and if there are boats, that means there are consumers, and apparently they are invading the Earth and getting on TV commercials.

I saw another commercial recently wherein a middle-age man gets off an airplane and is greeted by his wife, who says something like: “What did you bring back from your trip?” And the man replies: “Diarrhea.” Yes. He probably hasn’t seen his wife in a week, and the first thing out of his mouth, so to speak, is “Diarrhea.” Is this the behavior of a regular (ha ha!) human? Of course not. This is clearly another invading consumer from Mars, just like the ones that are always striding into drugstores and announcing at the top of their lungs that they have hemorrhoids.

The worst thing is that, as Martian consumers take over, they’re starting to influence the way businesses think. I received chilling evidence of this recently from alert reader Rick Johansen, who sent me an Associated Press article by David Kalish about food manufacturers who are putting less food into packages, but not reducing prices. One example was Knorr brand leek soup and recipe mix: The old box contained four eight-ounce servings, but the new box, which is slightly larger, contains only three eight-ounce servings. The story quotes a spokesperson for the manufacturer, CPC International, as saying that this change was made because—pay close attention here—there were “a lot of complaints from American consumers that we were giving them too much in the box.”