Newsletter – March 27, 2026
Debbie and I stopped for a selfie beside the movie poster for The Bride! at our local theater. The two monsters are on the right, in case you were wondering.
A few days later we had another date night celebrating our meet-iversary at our favorite restaurant, The Bryant. The fact that The Bride! and The Bryant almost sound alike is just a lucky coincidence.
We met when a mutual friend, Kat, was celebrating her 40th birthday and invited each of us to a party in a very modern house perched high atop the Hollywood Hills. It wasn’t her house, but it was a spectacular work of architecture with large windows looking down on the lights of Sunset Blvd.
If you want to get a good look at the house where we met, you can find it on YouTube under “Lethal Weapon 2 (9/10) Movie CLIP – Bringing Down the House (1989) HD”. Don’t worry about the fact that Mel Gibson drags the house down the hillside, that’s just a model. We visited the house a couple years ago and it’s still there.
Debbie was Kat’s massage therapist, and Kat and I were both in the same acting class. Kat knew I was working as a bartender at the Pantages Theatre and she offered to pay me to pour wine at her party. I offered to gift my services in honor of her birthday and she thanked me, telling me to consider myself a guest. “There will also be single women there,” she added with a smile. (As a friend of my ex-fiancee, she knew I had been single for about a year.)
Kat’s comment to Debbie was similar: “There will also be single men there.”
Debbie came down the stairs and smiled at me, and I thought I’d like to be the one who kindled that smile for years to come. She, in turn, has said many times that her first thought was “Oh, there’s my future husband.” We talked throughout the rest of the evening and got married a year and two months after that.
Is that a classic Hollywood meet-cute or what?!
Someone gave us a photo of Debbie and I from that night and it sits in a place of honor on our mantle. That’s me on the left, mid-sentence, talking to my acting teacher. Debbie is in profile holding the wine I poured her. No one knows who the skinny-tie-guy is, but he’s holding an empty wine glass so that might explain his expression of exasperation.
Not my fault, I had just met my future wife!
TTFN
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Eric Margerum 