Review: Crazy girls and the horndog who can't help falling for them
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 07 16, 2011
Max Lance (nice name for a comedian) writes about wacky first dates the way Don Rickles talks about blacks and Puerto Ricans. He comes on strong but after all the posturing and swagger he turns out to be a teddy bear at heart, a real mensch.Here's how he fawns about Jen, the girl he finally meets after encounters with Ingrid, Devin, Nina, Lauren and Tracy: "All I know is that after a slew of terrible nights of dating in New York City, I met a great girl and I don't want to screw it up." Jen, he says, "loves me more than I could ever hope for." That's Lance, the former horndog speaking. And, like Alex in "A Clockwork Orange," Lance was a lot more alive and engaging while living the wild life."Crazy Girls" would be a big pile of sweet mush if it were just about Jen. The point of this Kindle Short, fortunately, is to recount the stories of his really bad first dates, those hook-ups with weirdness he had before meeting Jen. This is a guy who had an AIDS test before ever having sex, just to reassure and please a potential score. He's the clown who after the first time thought "Why did I wait this long?" His second thought after the first time was "That was quick."Of all the wackos he spends time with, Devin was especially crazy. Although she said she was fine with it, her upbringing was likely the reason for most of the craziness.Her mom and grandma had been murdered in separate, unrelated incidents and she was raised by her sex-addicted father in a trailer park. Among the women he'd bring back to the trailer were Devin's teachers and moms of her friends. Devin, as a result, says she has a hard time getting physical with anyone. It took over a year for her to have sex with the guy she dated before meeting Lance. All this left Lance trying to figure out how her dirt-poor, trailer-park father could end up with so many women. "I wondered, was it a particularly nice trailer?"There must be some inherent fascination in reading about other people's sex life. Pile on top of that Lance's skill in mining every situation for its craziness and wacky humor and each and every one of his dating disasters becomes fun to hear about. He's a comedian and the stories he tells are really funny. Hilariously funny.[Give it 4.5 stars for its laughs. And, hey, it's a quick read and costs less than a buck]