Let's see here. I met Alyson a year before I dated her. It was during an improv thing. Improv comedy was a big interest of me since fifth grade when I saw ComedySportz come to my grade school. I decided I wanted to try it. I got cut freshman year for the high school CsZ team. But I got on the next year. It was at a CsZ workshop that I saw Alyson the first time.

I was a junior. She was a cute little redhead. I remember kinda staring at her and her friends thinking, "Wow..." But we didn't really mix much. I only saw her a few times. And there was all this other junior year stuff like Caroline, Gwyneth, Helen, Calista. No time for a girl I'd hardly seen.

Senior year. I'd just broken up with Calista. Helen stuff had blown up. So I was taking it easy for a while. One weekend in the fall, I had an amazing "meeting girls" weekend. This was the weekend of Senior Follies, a musical parody of school life written and performed by us, the senior class. I had a minor role but some cool singing and dancing parts so I was more excited about it that I thought I would be. So here's how the weekend went. After the Friday show of Follies, I met a girl at a cast party who seemed pretty cool. Then, the next night, Kevin Horkheimer told me that a friend of his who'd seen the show thought I was pretty cute. And on Sunday, I met Alyson.

This happened because a few weeks earlier, I'd told one of the guys on the improv team that I thought Alyson was cute. No big deals since I'm always finding girls and mentioning how cute they are to my friends. But in this case, Shuit knew Alyson (how well, I didn't know at the time).

So I'm walking out of a Sunday CsZ workshop. And the cute redhead's there. She looks at me as I'm rushing out and says, "You're Kip, right?"

"Yeah."

"I'm Alyson."

"Oh, hi," I mumbled as I took off for school and call time for the show. I was stressed. In the dressing room, I ruminated on how bad that must have looked. Hell, I look at it now and still think how bad it sounds. But I managed to top that later on in this tale.

Later on, I realized what a heel I must have presented myself as and tried to rectify the situation. I asked Shuit for Alyson's number with intent to call. A couple days later, he told me that her number was on the captain's list for CsZ and that I could call her that way. But I wasn't really that prepared as a captain and I lacked the list. So I had to a few more days while he got me her number. I called her that night. We talked for a while. It was a pretty standard first conversation for me, getting to know her and then quickly asking her out to coffee. "What'd you think of that segue?" I asked, trying to be self-deprecating about my non smooth move. "I've never been there." She replied. Hmmmm, that's a strange thing to say. But I gloss it over.

Kip Gets Even Smoother.