Once a year, I try to knock up a list of celebrity/known guys I would love to go on a dream date with. Some guys remain constant, as you shall see. (It helps that some have been dead, so there’s no danger of any tabloid revealing that they- you know- ate artichokes the wrong way (rolls eyeballs: a total buzzkill) or drank from a fingerbowl (the date is soo over!). One would expect me to date high-falutin’ dudes, it is true. But just because you can bust a dope rhyme like Donne or drop bass like Carl Cox, doesn’t mean you’ll pass Pristine’s dating reality show. Edouard Boubat would stink of darkroom chemicals, Desidirius Erasmus prolly took a bath once a month (Ewww..gross!). What’s more, the latter, in most likelihood, won’t go club-hopping with me. Andrei Tarkovsky would definitely stiff me with the bill (he never has any money), Herzog would still have some jungle disease crawling in his pants. Just for discussion’s sake, Tom Cruise, whom I will never date even if both my wrists got broken and D batteries were discontinued: No. I would throw Tom Cruise out of bed for even thinking the word “dough.”
So, here are the total hotties I would drop everything and go on a instant date with.
1.I adore Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. The movies he starred in were responsible for some of the most iconic Western films: The Seven Samurai(The Magnificent Seven), Sanjuro(For A Few Dollars More, A Fistful of Dollars, The Good, The Bad, the Ugly), and Hidden Fortress(Star Wars). I don’t know of any girl who wouldn’t want to be a princess is hiding, while being protected and looked over by Toshiro Mifune. Apart from all that though, he’s a looker, and a dashing Japanese gent. He remains my first pick for a dream date year after year.
2.Here is my favorite author whom I am still thinking of returning to school to get a masters-Ph’d on: Argentinian writer Jorge Luis-Borges. Although blind since the fifties, his profound influence remains in labyrinthian schemes of storytelling. He saw himself as a poet before anything else. He composed entirely from memory, later dictated to his wife Maria Kodama. His poetry is gorgeously restrained, filled with learning, humility, and a sense of history. My friend Richard saw him give a lecture at a university in the 70s, and told me that Borges was one of the most gentle and kind people he ever came across. I would totally spoil Borges if we ever went on a dream date. Some say that being in love is being blind, and I agree. When you’re in love, you’ll chose to be blind to your lover’s faults. You will undoubtedly look at this photograph and say “no effin way Pristine!” But having read Borges’s poems, to that I reply, “all I see is a kind, gentle loving man. I do not know what you are talking about.”
3.Michael Clarke Duncan. What an adorable man! I admit that D.E.B.S. was the only movie I remember him in. After all, what girl in her right mind wouldn’t go into a tizzy thinking about wearing short tight schoolgirl outfits and taking orders from a boss played by Duncan. C’mon! You do it, I do it, we all do it! I think apart from two other guys on my list here, he’s the few handsomest actors alive today!
4.Tony Leung is fantastic. He’s such a heartthrob in 2046 playing across Zhang Xihi. What a great team! I’m no different from any Asian girl. We keep the good stuff among our own! We Asians periodically deploy people like William Hung out as a decoy so all you guys would get distracted and we can focus on what really counts.
5.Shouting John McLaughlin, from the McLaughlin Group. I would totally drop everything I was doing and embark on a date with Washington bulldog John McLaughlin. For years, I thought every normal girl fantasized as I did: Pretending oneself to be Eleanor Clift while a ringleader was sitting two seats away yelling at Tony Blankley. Morton Kondrake, and Pat Buchanan. When John says “On a scale of one to ten, with one being zero degree likelihood and ten being metaphysical certitude….” I swoon like any other teenage girl who’s low rider jeans have cut off circulation an hour before. McLaughlin strikes me as an old-fashion man. If there ever was an anachronism to my 1950 fantasia, it would be shouting John. When Mclaughlin purportedly told Linda Dean that he needed a lot of sex and that he would take care of her material desires, it was and is wrong in the workplace (even wronger when you are not attracted to the speaker).
But seriously girls: You can admit it when we’re amongst ourselves.
6.As I’ve said in another post somewhere else, I don’t watch any more television these days. But once in a while when I did come across the WWE, Dan Batista the wrestler had a mighty swagger. You can have all the intellectuals you want, and I’ll be happy in the trailer park swooning with the other girls over Batista. You know Marilyn left Arthur Miller. The pen may be mightier than the sword, but to make the bed springs creak out a symphony, you need raw sack action S-M-A-CK-D-O-W-N.
7.Okay, my first exposure to Tony Hopkins was when he played the father of Audrey Rose. Girthwise, Oliver Reed was what Tony Hopkins is today. In the few short footages I’ve seen of Hopkins out and about town, he seems like a soft-spoken cordial gent who would be gracious to the girl without having to hold the door open, drop his jacket over the puddle, or pull the chair out for her. But I would expect that all the same. Even if he hadn’t been in a movie about frying a jerk’s brains and serving it to his galpal, I would still find him very amiable. But you know, that’s just me talking. I’m not asking for confirmation because I assume all girls will agree with me.
8.Delroy Lindo is another veteran of the Pristine top 10 dream date list. Aside from being an underrated actor, I find Lindo a handsome man. When my sister and I were given crayons in kindergarten and asked to draw a man, we both - on our own - drew a man who looked exactly like this. Lindo has got a look of somberness that I appreciate. As someone who is accused of being a non-smiler, it’s important to come across another fellow non-smiler. I think we would hit it off.
9.I consider Johnny McLaughlin, guitar god superiore the only rock star I ever spent two hours standing in the rain backstage waiting for. Leader of the Mahavishnu Orchestra in the 70s, McLaughlin contradicted his innocent schoolboy look with ferocious electric guitar riffs, culled from John Coltrane’s “sheets of sounds.” In person, McLaughlin is as personable, humble, and gracious as anyone could imagine him to be. McLaughlin is the heir to the sound of pianist Bill Evans. I know of no other musician - aside from Evans who could play so loud and fast, and then play so softly and introspectively. We would talk about Keith Jarrett and Brahms over dinner. When I was a youth, my friends use to taunt me about a television show on cable called “The McLaughlin Group.” They reported that it featured John McLaughlin jamming on his doubleneck every Sunday Morning. I used to scream, running into my bedroom and sobbing into my stuff animals, thinking I had missed an Inner Mounting Flame jam. What cruel friends I had!
10.I put Rocco all the way in the back because he has made his career practically appearing behind everyone else. I think Rocco has schoolboy charms. He also is a great kisser from what I have seen. He is adventurous, and he does all three things I’d love a guy to do to me.
Paul C. Burns’s Ladies Home Journal Illustration
