Before you ride the bike, you gotta fall over a few times

As I was enjoying the last few hours of my weekend, making dinner and watching Animal Planet* I noticed a new commercial for Arby’s new fish sandwiches. Apparently, this was a Super Bowl ad that I missed during a bathroom break or something. Anyway, the plot of the ad is pretty simple. Man is downstairs on couch and is summoned upstairs by his smoking-hot sig-other to find her dressed in sexy satin robe and fishnet stockings – which, naturally, get the man thinking about Arby’s fish sandwiches, thus foiling the woman’s planned seduction. Hilarity ensues. The commercial itself is not bad** but what stuck me to my seat was the fact that I know the smoking-hot woman. In fact, I went out with her once.

All right, all right, it was a blind date. And it was part of a campus-wide blind-date event called “Screw Your Roommate” where your roommate set you up with some random person – usually found by flipping through the facebook for the hottest freshman and then racing to figure out who her roommate was and then setting up the date (called “the screw”) ASAP. I was actually working on a show with her roommate that fall, and she thought I’d be fun and (probably more important) most likely harmless. The date itself was pretty fun, actually. We hung out and talked after the show she was in was over (different from the one her roommate and I were working on) and then went over to a house on campus where you can bake chocolate chip cookies 24 hours a day***. She is fun and charming and despite the fact that we were followed around all evening by a skeezy upperclassman who was stalking her and insisted on “just hanging out with us” all night****. It was once of those life moments I look back on and would have done completely different now that I’m a little more self-assured.

We stayed pretty good friends through school and I’ve seen her a few times since then, at reunion and at My Friend the Novelist’s wedding*****. She’s married now and is (obviously) working in commercials in Los Angeles. It still amazes me to see her on screen though, so far I’ve seen her in ads for Quizno’s, this Arby’s one, and one other one I can’t remember what it was for. I wonder if she’s trying to specialize…is there such a thing as a “fast prepared food niche” for ad work I wonder? In any event, I want to give a shout-out to Fishnet Girl for helping a nerdy guy from MN realize that he is cool enough to even charm the hot girls. If not for that lesson, I might have been too shy to talk to the GF at B.Da’s birthday******. And thank goodness for that.

So, in gratitude, I want all of you to go out and buy Arby’s Fish Sandwiches. Dozens of them! Hurry, before the campaign ends!

* “Animals that have ‘super’ powers”. Cool…
** Lord knows there were some really stupid ads during the Super Bowl. Giant monsters cross-breeding, anyone? Thanks Hummer, there's a mental picture I've been yearning formy entire life.
*** Obviously, a very popular place to bring your screw.
****Obviously trying to seduce her with the old “Look at me! I can grow a full beard! Aren’t I attractive? Validate me!” technique
***** At both of which she mentioned that our Screw Date was one of the most fun dates she had in all four years of school
****** The really weird thing? The GF also did commercials when she was a little kid. She made your younger siblings think Popples were cool and guilt-trip your dad into leaving work to go take you to McDonalds