Blind Date

Jane
by Jane Pratt
February 1998


Digging for dirt.
This month, Dandy Warhols singer Courtney Taylor cruises New York with our own Jane Pratt. He talks and sings. She plays groupie, then disappears.

Coney Island High, 6 P.M.
Jane:
His record company sent a limo – it seemed so touristy and funny. I went over to where we was doing sound check. I saw the band, but I wasn’t sure which was him.
Courtney: I saw this cute blonde in the club. Really cute.
Jane: I didn’t know how to say hello to him, So I went to hug him. He wasn’t into it. But we immediately started talking… I thought he was really beautiful.
Courtney: We just talked and talked. We had a lot of the same reference points for literature and music. That was a bonus.

Abyssina, 7:30 P.M.
Courtney:
We went to eat at this place where you eat with your hands – Indian?
Jane: We went to this Ethiopian restaurant. You sit on these little stools and eat with your hands off one big platter of spongy bread. But I was a bit jittery… I had 10 million things on my mind.
Courtney: It was amazing. We goaded each other into talking about relationships.
Jane: We’re the same in some ways. I can’t stand protocol or convention in conversation. We had plenty to talk about.

Limo, 9 P.M.
Courtney
: We had an hour to kill after dinner. We rode around in the limo, just talking. We’re both dirt diggers. We love to expose our deepest insecurities and then totally giggle about it. I love that.
Jane: I felt like I had known him for a long time. He was a mix of things you wouldn’t expect him to be. He had the look of a screwup, but he was actually really smart.
Courtney: Jane was so on. I had never met anyone who’d had the kind of experiences she’d had. Her one flaw is that she wouldn’t tell me if I were talking too much. She wouldn’t go “Hey, Jesus Christ, you need to shut up.”

Coney Island High, 10 P.M.
Jane:
We went back to the club, and Courtney went off to get ready for his show. Suzan Colon, our entertainment editor was there. She and I were joking around about who we would have been in the crowd 10 years earlier. I would’ve been the girl standing up on the speaker dancing around.
Courtney: When I’m about to play, I have a billion micro-issues to deal with. The last thing I think about is what is going on in anybody’s reality except mine.
Jane: The music was amazing; sort of Velvet Undergroundy in a way, with some Beach Boys. Then Suzan told me that I should leave. I wanted to stay because Courtney and I had been in the middle of a great conversation before the show. But Suzan told me, “It’s better to leave tan to be the girl who’s hanging around.”
Courtney: I had a knot in my stomach when I got done playing – she wasn’t there.
Jane: The other reason that I didn’t want to stick around was because he’d told me he wanted to go where the supermodels hang out after the show. I thought that was stupid. So I left.
Courtney: I was really bummed. It occurred to me, like, “What if she does that with everybody? Just connects, and then, poof, she’s off.” But I think having a really, really great time with somebody brand new is as rare as I thought it was.

The Next Day
Jane:
I didn’t know whether I’d see him again. But then I got flowers with a nice note from him that said something like “I wish we could’ve hung out after the show. I had so much fun with you last night.”
Courtney: I told my assistant to tell her when I’d be in town again and that I’d love to see her. It had been amazingly fun to just gab.
Jane: I was so happy, I went over and high-fived Suzan.
Courtney: I loved Jane. If I lived in New York, I could see hanging out intensely with her for months.