MeetCute – Eric Margerum

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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Newsletter – April 11, 2025

PHOTO CREDIT: paramountplus.com

I was working the early morning shift at a coffeehouse in Los Angeles called The Blue Parrot (named after the bar in Casablanca). It was sort of a tropical-themed Starbuck’s where I learned how to froth milk—whole and skim—make croissant sandwiches, and wipe down each and every table on the patio with steaming soapy water before we opened at seven.

A morning regular who struck up daily conversations with me when I brought him his latte and English Muffin told me he was a science consultant for “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” I enjoyed asking him questions about the series and he indulged me because I was a bit of a fan as well as an aspiring actor.

When “Star Trek III” came out I told him I had seen it and really enjoyed the story about the “Search for Spock.” He eyed me for a few seconds and asked me if I noticed anything else about the movie.

I knew he wasn’t consulting for any of the movies so he wouldn’t be offended if I pointed out a discrepancy.

“Well, there was one thing…” I said.

“Yes?” he leaned into the question, obviously keen to hear my answer.

“When the Klingons used the cloaking device, the Enterprise couldn’t fire on them because they couldn’t tell where they were. But then Sulu came up with a solution to launch a photon torpedo that followed the ion trail of the Klingon ship.”

“And the problem with that…?”

“Well, the cloaking device was introduced back in the original series. If a photon torpedo could track an ion trail they would have done that a long time ago.”

“Thank You!” he said, practically leaping out of his chair in righteous victory. “If YOU could see that, why didn’t any of the science types see that?”

He wasn’t insulting my intelligence but he did seem to have a bone to pick with the folk making the movies.

“Do you think they didn’t catch it?” I asked.

“No,” he said firmly, “I think the producers wanted an easy solution and told the consultants to ignore the problem because no one would notice.”

I learned something that day about storytelling: integrity. I’m not talking about moral principles, I’m talking about the integrity of a dam that successfully holds back the floodwaters. Whether it’s a science fiction story, a whodunnit, or a romance, there is an internal logic that has to be followed, the integrity of the story. Otherwise you lose the audience and they won’t trust you the next time.

By the way, my wife and I figured out that she had been coming to The Blue Parrot for months before we met but she always arrived after my morning shift. I picture a romantic comedy in which the couple keep missing each other until the inevitable meet-cute.

Live Long and Prosper

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My middle grade novel, The Most Amazing Museum of Los Angeles, is available through The BookBaby Bookshop at https://store.bookbaby.com/book/the-most-amazing-museum-of-los-angeles

Tag: MeetCute

Margerumalia – Meet-iversary Celebration

Margerumalia – The Star Trek Consultant