Dinner for Airplay - Francesca

I recently worked as an unpaid helper monkey for a local radio station. It was a great time, and I had some good friends there, so working for free wasn't that big of a deal. I ended up getting paid in CDs and concerts. But as I was there, I realized one thing: I'd never dated a musician. Now, I was pretty excited, as I was meeting lots of musicians every week, so I set out to accomplish the task of dating one of them. Let's face it, we all want someone to be so moved by us that they write a song about it. Granted, most of these songs are about breakups, but, whatever. My motives were not pure, but I figured if I was going to be hanging out with a lot of musicians, it wouldn't hurt to date one. I met one guy, Greg, from a very mediocre local band. I mean, he barely qualified, and he was a drummer, so...{insert drummer joke here}. But I figured it was a step in the right direction. He was kinda cute, and we'd been hanging out for a bit, so going on a date seemed like an okay idea. He picked me up, and really tried to impress me by taking me to the Olive Garden (look, people, I don't care where you live, there is always better Italian than the Olive Garden. And it's always packed...I don't really get it). Conversation was fairly good throughout, and I managed to have an okay time despite having terrible food. I was so excited...a good date amongst so many bad ones. We finished our dinner, and he was on the way back to my place to drop me off. As soon as we got in the car, he turned to me...this was the moment...the night had been building up, and I felt some butterflies as he tilted his head and turned in. But instead of coming closer, he just whispered "Now that I've taken you out, you have to play my CD on the radio." This was the weirdest form of "payment" for dinner that I've ever heard of...and all I could do was laugh and lie. "I'll see what I can do." Well, that wasn't really a lie. I did discover I have the ability to completely shatter a CD against a wall when thrown in the style of a boomerang. It's quite remarkable. And I do count my blessings, because seeing how musicians date after the face, I'm glad I was totally turned off of them from the first date. And thanks to the terrible date, Strata never received airplay and broke up a few months later due to frustration nothing was moving forward. I don't want to take all the credit, they really were a horrible band.