Brodie and I met on April 11, 2018, at the Arts Quincy Annual Meeting**. Arts Quincy is a nonprofit organization that I was working for at the time, and Brodie promoted them on air at the radio station he was with. My boss, Laura, asked Brodie to come to the meeting, and I was there taking pictures. Laura and my co-worker, Jenna, decided that it would be a good idea to set me up with Brodie. They both introduced me to him throughout the meeting. We had been discussing the fact they wanted to set us up in the office, but apparently they had not told Brodie what was happening. I made a bunch of cookies for the meeting (including my famous chocolate chip cookies), and so when Brodie had to leave the meeting, Jenna insisted that he took a plate of cookies with him.
The next day (or maybe two days later…cause I was trying to be cool) I added Brodie on Facebook. I waited about two more days and finally decided to send him a message and ask if he wanted to get a drink. I was hanging out with a bunch of my friends and they helped me construct a message. After several drafts, it came out something like, “Hey, it was nice to meet you the other night. Do you want to go get drinks sometime?” I later found out that Brodie had been sitting at his computer with a message box open about to ask me out, but he reminds me that I had a team of writers which is why I pressed send first. When he said yes, he immediately offered up a place and time for said date. This was an impressive move. It shouldn’t have been, but I was spending a lot of time dating men my own age who I connected with on dating apps…
We agreed to meet at The Wooden Rabbit (a bar that only lasted 5 months) for drinks on Wednesday night. It that point in my life I was in a routine when it came to first dates. They were ideally on a Wednesday or Thursday night and they were only for drinks. That way if they were going well, they could go longer, but if they were going badly, it was super easy to finish a drink and say goodbye. I arrived about 5 minutes late to the date (another tactic) to ensure that he was already there.
The bar was not very large or very crowded on a Wednesday night, so I found him easily. He was wearing jeans and a black and gray striped button-down shirt. I sat down and we awkwardly started making small-talk. We talked about our jobs. He told me about the radio station and I pretended not to know anything even though I had dated the only other country radio DJ in town for a couple of months the year before. He told me that his name wasn’t actually Brodie Mann as Facebook claimed. We exchanged the standard info on families and growing up. And then somewhere in the middle of the date, he said something like, “Sometimes I think about just becoming a blacksmith and traveling around with a renaissance faire.” to which I laughed and replied, “Most of my knowledge on the subject comes from a Gilmore Girls character who worked at a renaissance faire”. He then said “Oh yeah! Uh, Luke’s sister, right?”
After I caught my breath from being blown away that he could make a fairly deep cut reference to Gilmore Girls, I asked how he knew that, and he explained that he had watched the show the year before. I will be completely honest with all of you on the internet: Brodie got a second date with me because he had seen every episode of Gilmore Girls and I am not at all ashamed to tell you that.
We talked for a while and had at least two drinks each. He was on the air at 6 AM the next morning, but he was a trooper and stayed alert until we decided to end the evening.
As we walked to the parking lot, he told me he had a good time and would like to see me again. I gave him my phone number and told him to text me. I obviously called my friends on the way home to give them a full report. We spent the next week casually texting, and the next weekend I spent with my best friend in Indianapolis. He remembered for almost a week the day I said I was leaving town and texted me to have a safe trip. He told me he would give me space and not text too much so I could enjoy my time with Prudence. When I got back, our second date was to a symphony concert where we ran into three different people I knew, and at least three more people I was related to (classic Quincy problems).
Overall, he was slightly quiet and reserved on our first few dates, and I wasn’t sure that it was a relationship that was going to go anywhere, but two and a half months later he was meeting my extended family at our family reunion. They all loved him and told me not to screw it up. The rest, as they say, is history. I am so glad that fate (and my co-workers) brought us together. I cannot imagine my life without him.
**Side story: We could have met on my birthday, about 2 weeks before we actually did meet. I was out with my friends and we stopped by the bar where he and my boss, Laura, were judging a charity singing competition. I looked really good that night and I knew he was because I had heard about him in my office (and also facebook stalked him already, because that’s what you do when you’re single in a small town). He even took our group picture that night at the bar. And still, he didn’t give me so much as a second glance. I still like to give him grief about that.
Around the Determann's Firepit 