Attracting Today’s Woman
I used to manage the Hi-Fives.
Back in college, my friend Gary’s mom had no faith in his ability to score with chicks, or more accurately, she desperately wanted proof that he wasn’t gay. He wasn’t and isn’t gay, but she couldn’t wrap her head around him not having girlfriends to bring home for Thanksgiving like his cookie cutter frat boy brothers (actual brothers in frats not frat brothers).
For Christmas our senior year, Gary’s mom gave him a DVD copy of a film called The Guide To Attracting Today’s Woman, and a letter opener with a swastika on it… She is not a Nazi, but instead, someone who could be gently described as being underly aware of their environment and the world.
The way that The Guide To Attracting Today’s Woman came into Gary’s life, and in turn mine and all of our friends’ lives seems almost like a tale crafted by Carl Sandburg. No one is exactly sure where Gary’s mom got the video, and by all accounts and records the film, only exists in our memories and as a crappy CDR copy that my friend Mack eventually uploaded to YouTube. The original was stolen and there seems to be no record of it ever existing, even in the vast online databases.
Why am I telling you about this besides the fact that if you don’t watch this video in its entirety are wasting your life?
Well, I started thinking about this video after I found myself as part of a low budget, run and gun production shooting in Venice, CA portraying kooky characters harassing a nerdy man played by Mo Rocca. There are a good number of scenes in The Guide To Attracting Today’s Woman that take place in and round the Venice boardwalk and involve a nerdy man being harassed. One scene in particular that is engrained in my memory portrays five black men putting a nerdy guy, Henry, in a trash can, and then failing to connect on over 4 attempted high-fives.
If you had told me back in college that someday I would be a black man trying to high-five on the boardwalk in Venice, I would have told you to get the fuck out.
