Lonely As An Empty Well

Lola hadn't liked the idea of answering a personal ad, especially an on-line ad; it made her feel desperate and hopeless and cheap. 'Why,' she wondered, 'should I need to search the personal ads, when there are so many men attracted to me, and I'm asked out, or more accurately, “hit on,” so many times each week?"

But Lola was lonely in that particular way that only beautiful, indeed, very beautiful, women are lonely; empty-well lonely, and thirsting for the kind of recognition and acknowledgment that the men in Hollywood couldn't even imagine a woman needed. She desperately wanted someone who could see beyond her physical beauty, someone who understood her and knew who she ‘really’ was.

Each week Lola looked through the on-line personal ads, and when after a few months of disappointment and near resignation to a life of utter and unrelieved loneliness, she finally glimpsed an ad that sought a woman who loved pre-Socratic philosophy and Martinis without olives, she was certain that this was the one man, the one-in-a-billion, who might just be her perfect mate. Little did she know, of course, that Richard would show up for their first date, in a chicken outfit asking that one unanswerable question that even the pre-Socratic philosophers avoided like the plague: “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”