The one that got away

[EdelweissFan]

I was looking at a thread in this forum about falling in love for the first time, and really it was about the first porn star that poster felt really, really attracted to. Hardly falling in love.

I wonder how many of you actually fell in love but for stupid reasons didn't follow through or did, but somehow let that person slip away.

About 15 years ago, when I used to go to the club that gives me my screen name, I met a girl named Tawana (yeah, like Brawley, another scandal name of that era). She was Vietnamese. I eventually asked her about her name and it made perfect sense: she was born with the very common Vietnamese boy name Tuan and when she became a girl, she added an "a".

She was completely unlike all the other Edelweiss girls, and our friendship was completely unlike the friendships or "relationships" I had with any other girl at that time. She really didn't like hanging out at that club for "dates," and she also had a lot going on for her.

We eventually started dating, and I don't mean in the Edelweiss/HA way. We went to movies, restaurants, gay sing along broadway show tunes bars in the west village, jazz clubs and my neighborhood bars in Brooklyn where I lived at that time. In fact our relationship was strangely chaste, because I had just gotten out of a 15 year marriage and was kind of screwing around a lot and I respected her too much to be her boyfriend and cheat on her.

She was very beautiful and talented. Unlike many girls at that time, she was on track with her career, and she had a very supportive family. She was a student at F.I.T., made her own very beautiful clothing, and her family, a business oriented Asian family, was cautiously re-entering the Vietnamese clothing production market from which they had fled as boat people in the 70s. Although she was pretty unconventional by Vietnamese traditional values, her family recognized her talent for design and business and they were expecting her to take over the family business.

I took her out often, but frankly I blew her off a lot. She would call me at night, and I would talk to her, but I didn't really get it. She really, really wanted to get together. I was mad attracted to her, but I couldn't imagine being "out" to my parents, friends and family. Eventually she got a scholarship to study fashion design in Milan, Italy. I remember she had some kind of emergency at the last minute and needed money and a fake letter about her residency status which by some miracle I was able to procure for her. She went to Milan and she called me a few times during her year abroad.

When she came back, we had lunch in Manhattan, at a fancy, famous restaurant. I was jaw dropping astounded. She was, in a way, less "feminine," in the sense that she wasn't "in drag." She was comfortably androgenous, something she said she learned in Europe. She was drop dead gorgeous, but neither male nor female, just Tuana. She was worldly, sophisticated, beautiful, intelligent -- in a word the perfect woman. She took a design job in fabric company in Georgia and called a few times, but I lost touch with her.

I sometimes fantasize about if I had had the courage to be out with her. In retrospect, I think she was the most desirable woman in New York.

She's the one who got away, but at the time, I was too stupid to even realize what a catch she was. I heard she got married and if so, I'm ecstatic for her. She deserved it.

Just for old times sake if anyone remembers Tuana from Edelweiss or knows anything about her please post in this thread.