7/27/14

How I met Steph is kind of a long story. The short of it, the story that Steph knows, is that I showed up at the bar she worked at one night with a photographer friend (@chuck) and ended up getting her number when he asked her to model for his upcoming book. The reality is a bit different, and goes like this.

In the fall of 2013, I started talking to another photographer in Austin named Sarah. We were going to hang out, platonically, to work together, but those plans seemed to fall apart when she got a new boyfriend, Mikey. Makes total sense. From what I could tell, Sarah and Mikey were awesome together and seemed inseparable. I was on Mikey’s Instagram on one of those internet black hole nights where you start out looking at your buddy’s recent photos and a few clicks later you’re looking at, like, your first girlfriend’s new boyfriend’s cousin’s step sisters graduation photos, and I saw a photo of his ex-girlfriend. Her instagram handle was @stephisdead, which I thought was super badass, and she was beautiful to boot, plus she was from Boston which was just icing on the cake. So, that’s when I first heard of Steph. Then, in early 2014 I went out with a girl named Cat a few times, who had a mutual best friend with Steph. Via photos of Cat, my memory of Steph was refreshed. In spring of 2014, Jerry and I were walking up East 6th Street during SXSW. I was wearing a 5-panel hat from Orchard, which is a skateshop in Boston, and a girl walked by and said, “nice hat, are you from Boston?” I was on the phone, so I quickly said “yeah” and she walked along. A few seconds later I realized who it was and said to Jerry, “dude that was Steph.” He said, “who?” Which was a valid point, because to this point I still hadn’t really met her. Then, a few months later, I ended up hanging out with Sarah and Mikey to use them in a few photos. Those photos ended up on the front page of Buzzfeed, which Steph reads. Fast forward to July and Chuck is staying with me while on the road making his book, Restoring American Beauty. We’re at a bar one night with Chase, his wife, and our friends Laura (@laura_elizabeth) and her now fiance Matt (@explorermattarbo). Matt, probably the nicest most outgoing dude I’ve ever met in my life, is a big dancer, and so he and Laura ask for recommendations on where to go dancing. For whatever reason, Steph pops into my mind at this moment, and I know from my time going out with Cat that she works at Barbarella, a popular dance bar in Austin. So we all go to Barbarella. No sign of Steph. Whatever, no big deal, so we all head to the dance floor and start dancing. The bar is crazy hot and sweaty, so eventually I need a breather. I walk down a long hall that leads outside, where, to my surprise, there is another bar. And, as luck would have it, Steph is bartending. I go up to the bar, get a beer, start talking to her, give her my Red Sox debit card to start a tab which I know will start an icebreaker conversation about Boston, and eventually ask her if she wants to be a model in a book because my friend Chuck has some open time and is looking for additional models the next day. She asks to see Chuck’s Instagram, so I show her, then she asks for mine, so I show her. She goes, “Oh yeah, I saw you on Buzzfeed the other day! You know my ex-boyfriend.” I go, “wow, really? what a small world,” then in my head I break the fourth wall, look at the camera, and give a wink to the audience.

To make this long story a bit longer, Steph ends up doing a photoshoot with Chuck the next day, but then we go out to take some photos a few days later, 7/27. The plan was to take some photos at sunset. So we did that. Then I invited her back to my pool to go swimming. After that (10 PM) she suggested we go hiking in the Greenbelt, which is Austin’s version of a forest except probably with more rattlesnakes and deadly animals and homeless vagrants than a normal forest. I’m scared of rattlesnakes and homeless vagrants and also the dark so I wanted no part of it, but I had to go because Steph wanted to. So we did that, then we got hungry so we got Whataburger and laid out on the hill overlooking the city. After that, she took me to her favorite place, which really was just another dark place that looked like it was filled with rattlesnakes and homeless vagrants. So she took me to another place, which was a lot cooler, the huge swings under the East 7th bridge at Springdale. After that (1 AM) we went to Whisler to take shots, which led to me suggesting we should go to the docks at the Four Seasons. On the way there we found a hammock, which we laid in for a while, until a member of the hotel staff told us it was late and we should go to our rooms. But we had planned out fake names to use so we didn’t get kicked out. Then we went down to the docks at 2 AM where there was a couple drinking wine and making out and eventually sneakily but actually not that sneakily having sex. Steph said she felt like she was in an indie movie, which became a running joke on all the future dates we would go on. I put on an “indie movie soundtrack” (”French Exit” by TV Girl) and started to kiss her. At 4 AM I got home and got a few hours of sleep before getting up for work. It was a good first date.

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