Tripping the Lights

Valentine's Day is the Super Bowl for die-hard romantics, and every year the challenge is to make the halftime show something memorable. I was fortunate that this particular Valentine's Day my girlfriend and I were still in that giddy phase where grand romantic gestures seemed a daily priority.

For our first Valentine's Day as a couple, I arranged for the standard ho-hum dinner at a North End restaurant as disguise for the night's true payoff, which I had dutifully worked out over the course of the day. The dinner went kind of as expected. On returning to my place, the evening ostensibly over (wink wink), I walked her up the back stairs, out the fire door, and onto the roof, where to her knee-buckling surprise she saw what I had done: defying the admonitions of the condo building I live in, I'd snaked 150 feet of orange extension cord from my basement apartment and strung about a thousand feet of white Christmas lights in rough concentric circles to create a 10-by-10-foot dance floor right in the center. I walked over to the CD player I had cued up and pushed PLAY.

We danced under a cold, clear sky and the Christmas lights to the old Flamingos swoon song "I Only Have Eyes for You." I was never really able to match that moment over the course of our next six months, and our relationship finally dissolved, but it still ranks as one of my finest efforts. I know it lingers brightly among her favorite times, too.

| Where Did Our Love Gogh?| Under Where?| Thank Heaven for Little Girls| Doing the Right Wrong Thing| Aw, Shoot| Submitted for Approval| Liar, Liar| All Night Long| Hello, Sailor| Sign of the Times| Queasy Rider| Tripping the Lights| Bar Fright| Circles of Love|