Annie Oakley meets Scoop Jackson - for real.

We had met before. He was, after all, in my chorus class - remember?

But, those early meetings were just glances across the room from the soprano section (which totally didn't fit me at all) to the alto section. Several glances, in fact. C'mon, I had to see what Chicago Bulls t-shirt he had in store for me each day.

Anyway, my best friend, Betsy, and I arrived at our destination fashionably late (okay, there was nothing fashionable about me, but that's beside the point) and met up with her date - we'll call him Car Guy - for the evening. Each time a slow song would come on, I would mingle with friends or take my designated seat on the "no date to dance with" bleachers.

Near the end of the evening, I had joined Betsy and Car Guy on the dance floor during one of the faster songs. We were probably talking about cars - because, as his namesake would imply, Car Guy really liked cars - when another slow song came on.

Great. I started to make my way back to the bleachers when Car Guy grabbed my arm and shoved me toward one of his friends. I mean, who doesn't like being pitied?

And there was Scoop. He didn't have anyone to dance with either, so Car Guy thought it would be nice for us to dance together. And, it was nice to have someone to dance with - even if he was quite a bit shorter than I was.

Since our last encounter in chorus a year ago, his bowl hair cut had been replaced with a much more up-to-date hair cut and his normal, Chicago Bulls t-shirts had been replaced with a shirt and tie. Nice.

In fact, he was nice all around. Nice to talk to. Nicely dressed. And, nice to me.

So, we danced. At least, we considered it dancing even though we barely had the guts to touch each other and we stood far enough away that the former President Harry Truman could have dropped another atomic bomb - this time between us - and it wouldn't have harmed a hair on our cute little junior high heads.

I would like to say that I was sold right then and there, but I wasn't. It's not that I didn't like him, it's just that we only talked the length of a slow song - the very last slow song, as fate would have it - and that's all the farther things went.

Betsy and I left the dance with her resigned that she would not date Car Guy with and me resigned that boys were short, stupid and I would never go to another dance again - unless I had a date.

The next dance in my junior high career just happened to be the eighth grade graduation dance and it turns out I would have a date - but, it wasn't Scoop. My date turned out to be Car Guy.

After Betsy decided that Car Guy wasn't the guy for her, we spent quite a bit of time together. He needed to talk to someone about how much he liked my best friend and I - well who knows what I wanted. As I look back at it all now, I think I was just flattered that a boy wanted to talk to cowboy-boots-clad, horse-t-shirt-wearing me.

Either way, we ended up going to a dance together. He was just as tall as I was. He talked about cars - which didn't bother me since I grew up at my family's car dealership (I'm sure that little tid bit didn't bother him, either) and I talked about...well, who the hell knows.

We ended up talking on the phone most of the subsequent summer months. And, we ended up dating beginning our freshman year of high school. In fact, we ended up dating the next four years of high school. There were fights and there were break-ups. We got back together and went to dances. We were best couple our senior year, for Heaven's sake. But, more on that later.

Anyway, seeing that Scoop and Car Guy (I know - I really have a knack for coming up with creative, fake names) were friends, I also saw a lot of Scoop the next four years of my life. More on that later, too.