Wednesday, September 13, 2000
Relationship
Michele Alexander and Jeannie Long used to scare men
away. Now, everyone wants their number, they tell
Charles Laurence.
INSPIRATION does not strike many people when they are
nursing a hangover and a strong cup of coffee, but
that is exactly when it visited Jeannie Long and
Michele Alexander.
Sitting in their Los Angeles apartment, desperately
trying to recover from yet another hectic night out on
the town, the two friends began discussing their
terrible failures when it came to picking up men. We
should write a book, they thought--the universal
"don'ts'' of dating.
So they began jotting down their thoughts. Tried and
tested ways of sending your man running in the
opposite direction include telling him he looks like
your father; referring to him as your boyfriend after
only one date; and announcing yourself simply as "me''
when you call him late at night.
In spite of their pounding heads, the list grew and
grew. The result was a slim volume entitled How to
Lose a Guy in 10 Days.
"We wrote most of it that morning,'' says Michele.
"And we wrote the rest of it about a week later in a
bar after we had been to a concert. There was this
guy, you see, totally trying to hit on everyone.''
"And that was the thing,'' continues Jeannie, "it
suddenly seemed so absurd, the whole dating-mating
thing, the desperation ...''
At first, How to Lose a Guy, with its witty one-liners
and stick-figure drawings, was just a private joke.
But because everyone who saw the book at their
apartment found it so funny, the pair decided to run
off a few copies at their local copy-shop and give
them away as Christmas presents.
Then a friend showed it to a friend who just happened
to work for a publishing agent and--va-voom!--it was
soon destined for the shelves of Borders and Barnes &
Noble.
And now, just when these two 30-year-olds cannot
believe that life could get any better (both girls
worked in lowly jobs on the fringes of the
entertainment industry before going into web
marketing), it is announced that How to Lose a Guy is
to be made into a film produced by Robert Evans, the
legend behind Chinatown, Love Story and The Godfather.
It will star Gwyneth Paltrow.
Jeannie and Michele met when they were 12 years old in
their hometown of Tallahassee, Florida, and have been
best friends ever since. Their apartment, which lies
in a slightly seedy but affordable district of Los
Angeles, is piled high with towers of CDs, clothes and
teddy bears. Snapshots of jolly parties are stuck to
the door of the refrigerator.
The only sign that any work is done in this place is a
pair of laptop computers sitting on a makeshift desk.
Michele is blonde and good-looking, with blue eyes and
red lips. Jeannie has a cascade of dark curls and a
slightly eccentric cast of features centred on a nice,
pert nose. They make a good double act.
"We have all the character flaws of the girl in the
book,'' says Michele. "Not the flaws, the
eccentricities,'' corrects Jeannie.
"But the point is that it's so funny because it is
real,'' says Michele.
"Factual, even,'' says Jeannie. "Believe me, either
one of us, or one of our friends, is guilty of doing
absolutely everything in this book.''
(This is alarmingly true: just like their ditsy
heroine, Michele even admits to constantly doing the
splits in front of an old boyfriend in an effort to
remind him of her lithe flexibility.)
How to Lose a Guy does not quite fit into the
self-help genre to which so many Americans have become
addicted, but there is plenty in it of which a girl
should take heed, and its 130 or so pithy pages are
perfectly pitched at those with a dot.com
concentration span.
Want to put the frighteners on your latest date? Well,
by day two of the relationship you should be telling
him that you love him; and by day six, you should have
bought him a T-shirt with both your names airbrushed
on it and a picture of his car.
If you spend the night at his place and he goes out
the next morning to run a few errands, don't waste a
second: "get busy,'' urge the authors. First, go
through all his things.
Call his mother and introduce yourself. Then read his
high school yearbook (or flick through a few of his
old photograph albums and persuade his mother or
sister to tell you the stories behind the pictures).
When he returns, make sure you are wearing his shirt.
Say: "Remember when you and Scooter got arrested after
that football game? That was the funniest story I ever
heard.'' Ask him if he still has feelings for his
ex-girlfriend.
On day eight, tell him this is the longest you have
dated someone and that you met your last boyfriend on
the Internet. On day nine, fly your parents in just to
meet him.
After this, it's downhill all the way. Your man will
be well and truly cornered--with the result that, by
day 10, you'll be telling him that he's changed and
you don't know him any more. It's time to go to a
party and meet someone new. The whole miserable cycle
must begin all over again.
So haven't Michele and Jeannie ever had any luck with
the opposite sex?
Apparently not. In all the years they have been
friends, only one of them has ever had a stab at a
serious love affair, and that was years ago. After
college, Michele went to Denver, Colorado, to be with
a man. It lasted two years.
"She calls them the lost years,'' says Jeannie.
"Yeah, lost,'' repeats Michele.
In the end, both girls decided that love could wait.
Instead, they settled in LA and began work in the new
high-tech world--digital music editing, website
designing, even, in the case of Jeannie, running
computer systems for the powerful Creative Artists
Agency.
These years were a struggle, and they still can't
believe that they have finally got their big break.
"It's hard here,'' she says. "Los Angeles is a bit
like high school with too much money.''
Still, it will probably not be too long before they
are walking up the red carpet at the premiere of the
film of their book. And naturally, there is a
follow-up in the pipeline, this time for klutzy males.
It is called--surprise, surprise--How to Lose a Girl
in 10 Days.
It is, it seems, a very bad idea indeed to invite a
girl home to watch you play Nintendo games with your
mate, an even worse one to blame your erotic disasters
on the fact that you have had too much to drink. We
have been warned.
Shrewdly, though, Jeannie and Michele will not be
sending it out to hungry publishers until the film of
the first is up there on the silver screen. After
that, there should be plenty of time for romance.
"I want to establish myself, and then find someone,''
says Michele.
"That's just what we all want,'' says Jeannie.
Given that both girls have learnt the lessons of the
dating game--and, as a result, neither one is likely
to be tempted to send their true love a tape with
significant smoochy songs specially recorded on it--it
isn't too hard to imagine them both succeeding
sometime soon.
Text: © Telegraph Group Ltd, London
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