In the summer of 2016, I asked one of my best friends to attend a Hall and Oates concert at an outdoor venue.  We live far enough away that we don’t get to see each other too often and we have a long and glorious history of attending concerts together.  That’s not to say that I don’t ever go with my wife.  We have been to quite a few as a couple.  But Hall and Oates is a love that I shared with my friend and my wife barely knew who they were.

Now that I have provided the background, let’s get to the juicy story.  During the concert, a woman came through the crowd and stopped in front of us in the middle of a song.  Neither of us knew her or had any clue why she was stopping, but we did have some reservations because of a past experience at the same venue when a man and woman got into a fight right next to us seemingly for no apparent reason.

However, this woman was not trying to start a tussle.  She politely asked us for a joint.  This caught me off-guard because we weren’t smoking anything as she walked up and I have never even held a joint in my whole life.  You might find that a surprise after you learn that my first CD I ever owned was of Snoop Dogg.  As it turns out, I have a wide variety of tastes in music so don’t stereotype me based on that one CD.  I am pretty introverted, conservative, I am not a rebel or much of a risk-taker.  So after the initial shock of her comment, I decided to take it as a compliment.  She went on pressing us for the “weed” and we kept denying  ownership.  We pointed out all the groups of people around us who were obviously smoking based on the contact high we were getting from our position in the crowd, the prevailing wind pattern and drifting smoke.  She finally decided maybe we weren’t lying to her.

She saw our wedding rings and immediately came to the conclusion we were romantically involved.  Then she decided to tell us how cute of a couple we were.  No one had profiled me for being gay so I was a little surprised by this comment too.  But at the same time, I was flattered that she had looked at me for such a short amount of time and thought I would make part of a cute couple.  Maybe I was dressed better than I thought.  Or maybe it was my friend’s salmon-ish colored shirt.  Maybe it was the sight of two bros on one blanket at a Hall and Oates concert.  Maybe it was seeing us holding hands that made her think this.  I’m kidding, we weren’t holding hands.

We went along with her story, my friend really playing up the idea with his responses.  I figured we would have better luck moving on from the whole conversation if we didn’t argue with her.  It took over 5 minutes to debate with her about the marijuana we didn’t have.  I wasn’t about to get in an argument with a stranger about my sexuality during the middle of the concert.  As coincidence would have it, during the song “I can’t go for that.  No can do.”

She left.  But we caught back up with her on the walk to the parking lot.  She was very paranoid that we hated her and didn’t like talking to her.  So again, we spent another several minutes trying to explain that we liked her just fine and we wanted to be friends.  As odd and crazy as this woman was, she stereotyped me in two different ways that were completely new for me.

When we got in the car, someone hinted that his kiss was on my list.  I told him my private eyes were watching him and that he made my dreams come true.  But only for the purposes of confusing a strange lady on a warm summer night in Cincinnati.