The meet-cute (rom com, Act One)

a tale of two idiots who fell in love as told by one of those idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying everything

“The rom-com is dead.”

— a dirty tabloid called The New Yorker

False. 

The rom-com is alive and well. Thriving, even, right here in my very own home.

Nighty-Night, Sleep Tight

I didn’t know Lauren talked in her sleep.

A few months into our relationship, in the thick of our puppy love infatuation, each of us sleeping, she sat up in bed and screamed, “THERES A ROBBER IN THE HOUSE.”

She then realized she was sleeptalking, giggled, and said, “oops, nevermind” and went back to sleep.

While I, lying there next to her, felt like I’d just chugged a hellish brew of coffee, red bull, and battery acid. I stared up at the ceiling, fight and flight both activated in my very nervous nervous system.

I’m no relationship expert, but there’s gotta be a way to tell your boyfriend, “Hey, uh, just so you’re aware, I might wake up in the dead of night screaming about active crimes. But if I do, don’t stress, I’m just being a silly lil billy!”

Another time, she sat up in bed, grabbed our dog Robert and cradled him in her arms like a baby, saying, “You have to hold the baby like this” while Robert and I gave each other the understanding look of ‘ah, it’s happening again.’

Talking with a sleeptalker feels like a low-stakes version of negotiating with the bad guy in a hostage situation: keep things simple, speak their language, and never negate their reality - their truth is the truth, period. 

Take the other night for example.

I get into bed and she says, already sound asleep, “I’m so tired.” 

Instead of saying “you’re literally asleep”—and risk her going through the existential version of dying in your own dream—I say, “I know, you should just go to sleep then,” making sure the ‘should’ is as gentle as possible.

But she doesn’t, instead asking, “how was the improv show?”

“Good,” I said, lying. There’d been no improv show, although there was one now, here in our bed. All of life is one big improv show when you really think about it. I’m sure that’s what she meant.

---

My favorite example to date of Lauren’s sleeptalking happened about a year ago.

I crawled stealthily into the bed, trying not to wake her.

“Hey,” she said, half asleep, her voice sounding a like a drunk fairy.

“Hi,” I said back. 

Usually Lauren would ask, “are all the doors locked?” But tonight she didn’t, not exactly. 

“Are we all buckled up?” she asked, fast asleep. 

“Yes. Yes we are,” I said back, laughing to myself, already planning how I’d tell her about this in the morning. 

it all began at homecoming

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The story of how we met - that started in 2011.

“Where Them Girls At” by David Guetta was topping the charts.

That story, the real story, is my and Lauren’s personal mythos, a tale of two idiots who met and fell into a dream-like haze of love, separated by 3,000 some odd miles, insane and dumb and destined to fail and yet…

And yet.

It’s the sort of love that, even if for a brief time, makes you forget how cynical you are about the world, about yourself, about the possibility of finding someone that might accept you in ways you may never accept yourself, proving the dumb ‘love yourself before you can love’ completely false.

Even if just for a little while, it’s a miracle that it happened at all.

You know what else is a miracle? That any feature film ever actually gets made. Like say for example a film about, oh I dunno, a group of senior friends who find themselves visited by a deadly presence from their past in the dark and desolate halls of their very own high school.

Bloody Homecoming - June 2011

Lauren and I met on the set of Bloody Homecoming, the film that has won Best Picture at the Oscars every year since its 2012 release (not even lying you can look it up it’s all over the internet). 

It was my first feature film - I got paid a whopping $0 for it - and Lauren was doing makeup, a gig she got through grad school. 

Lauren reminded me that this was the headshot I was using at that time, which is insane. You can’t see half of my face! But something about it must have caught the eye of the geniuses behind Bloody Homecoming…

Lauren says I walked into the makeup room and said, “Hi I’m Alex, I’m playing Steve Stein,” like an eager idiot. 

I thought she was so cool. Funny and beautiful and poised and out of my league like several leagues away in fact. She wore a leather jacket which I’ve since learned was not leather. But that’s okay - I wasn’t really Steve Stein. 

here I am playing Steve Stein, with my on-screen girlfriend whose name, NO JOKE, WAS LOREN!!!!!

A week into the shoot, we were doing a — SPOILER ALERT —classic “killer finds the teenagers at one of their houses during a party” scene. It’s not professional to have your phone on you while filming, so I asked the makeup artists if they could hold it for me.

When I got it back after my scene, after no doubt absolutely crushing the scene (I’ve won Best Single Scene Oscar ten years running), I started receiving flirty texts from an unknown number claiming to be an actress on set. Not one of the other ‘teenagers’ who were all, like myself, in their mid twenties, but one of the ‘adult’ characters who played a teacher or principal or something, and actually come to think of it ended up being the killer lol.

That’s another spoiler alert. Dang. Can’t delete this gotta keep going.

I responded in kind, knowing that it wasn’t the actress but that whoever it was, they were super funny. Finally I found the makeup team and asked who was texting me and they went “uhh durp” and so I called the number and bam, Lauren’s phone rang (or buzzed probably since we were on set). 

Lauren claims that once I handed my phone to the makeup team to hold (something I have since learned is not part of their job description), one of the other makeup artists suggested they prank me as payback for thinking they were bonafide assistants for the actors.

None of the other makeup artists wanted to do it, so Lauren, always being a helpful and great member of any makeup department, was the one who ended up having to send the texts pretending to be the actress.

I love how weird this detail of our relationship is: we began flirting over text message and inside of a joke, layers upon layers of artifice to protect and embolden and still, through all that, both of us were like “ok this person sorta rules.”

I wish we still had those texts - the first of what must be, by now, hundreds of thousands of our written back-and-forths via text, email, gchat, fb messenger, etc. 

We also still have the leather jacket. I think one day we’ll hang it up like sports teams do with retired jerseys¹.

Back to Bloody Homecoming

Two weeks into the production, we finally had a day off. We all went out in Downtown Austin. At our first spot of the evening, Lauren and I sat next to each other and couldn't stop talking, so we went walking down sixth street, each wanting the other to think them cool.

The first ever photo taken of us on that night downtown.

After the bars, I offered to take Lauren and a few others to an amazing Austin local spot. We ordered Ubers and after a long ass drive, we arrived.

At Wafflehouse.

You know, a classic Austin hole in the wall.

Eventually, everyone else went back to the hotel where Lauren and the rest of the out-of-town crew were staying. The two of us hung back and spent the whole night sitting on a patch of grass and talking. We didn't even kiss though because I was sort of seeing someone else at the time, so it seemed wrong (me and the other woman weren’t exclusive, a fact I feel very defensive about even saying but its true!).

Then the sun came up, and oops, we kissed.

And what a kiss it musta been, because by 9:30am, I'd driven to see the other lady. She told me her aunt or someone in her family had recently died, and I still for some reason told her I needed to end things because I was 23 and an asshole.

This is classic rom-com stuff by the way, establishing a pattern of behavior that's...not great so as to create the room for growth, change, transformation.

I got back to set at 12:30pm. We were shooting at this high school in Elgin, TX, the Sausage Capital of Texas.

I remember it super clearly or at least think I do: I approached Lauren and sat down next to her, sweating from lack of sleep and nerves and alcohol trying to escape my pores.

Great romcoms hinge on this moment. The “wuh oh” here-we-go moment, the point of no return after which all the insane shit that follows becomes inevitable, even reasonable within the dream logic of the love that is the film.

It’s like everything so far has been a slow ascent up one of those old rickety roller coasters, rising into the heavens, clicking and clacking its way up the wooden tracks, up and over each wooden slat, creaking, groaning, and finally stopping.

And in that brief second of pause before the drop, you both wonder to yourself: will this creaky ass, definitely about-to-break roller coaster hold? Or put another way:

Are we all buckled up?

Or are we about to be catapulted into the fire and bramble, the goofs and the ramble?

Are we all buckled up?

Or will this RomCom Comet end in mutually assured destruction?

Are we all buckled up, or -

There we were, sitting against a brick wall in Elgin TX. The director yells “ACTION” and we try to be quiet, a silence filled with giggles. We were like two school children. I wanted to speak but I didn’t know what to say. Buck up, I told myself, buckle up!

Wood crashes against metal, stomachs drop and rise at the same time somehow, nothingness, everythingness,, silence, then…freefall.

“I ended things with the other girl (who I was just casually dating by the way lol),” I said.

Lauren snapped her head towards me, eyes wide and expression unreadable.

CUT TO BLACK ACT TWO COMING SOON THIS IS CALLED A CLIFFHANGER LIKE IN GAME OF THROMES WHEN JON SNOW REVEALS THAT HE’S ACTUALLY A WOMAN LIKE IN JOAN OF ARC AND THEN EVERYONE CALLS HIM JOAN SNOW THAT WAS NUTS DO YALL REMEMBER

✍ Comment:

Let’s talk about it. Some prompts:

1. Whats ur favorite romcom?

2. Whats ur fav movie that isn’t a rom com but is more true about love than any rom com ever?

3. Do you have a great origin story for your relationship? Or a terrible one? Either way plz share could be dope.

4. How many times have you seen Bloody Homecoming? Whats your fav part? Why are you so sure it will once again win the Oscars this weekend?

1. (update from Lauren: we do not actually have the leather jacket)