Ok, so you've made the phone call, you've arranged a date, and you're going to meet the girl for dinner.  You know there are going to be problems  and cheek-reddening minor glitches, but you are prepared for that and accepted it as par for the course.  You've removed the possibility of the embarrasment of offensive BO by scrubbing yourself raw, shaving and aftershaving, combing and clipping and creaming, until you smell like a basket of intoxicating pot-pourri.  You've chosen your finest threads to save your dinner partner the embarrasment of being seen with a sewer worker on lunch break and you are, reassuringly, prepared.  

So, the greeting kiss on the cheek overshoots the mark and lands behind the ear, but its still a recoverable situation.  Its still not fatal when both of you ask one another akwardly and simultaenously how work is.  You arrive to the restaurant on time, phew the table is booked, looks and smell nice, good call.  The menu is mouth watering, but you try to hide the fact by wiping regularly, and the choice is overwhelming.  You order the salad, followed by the steak and you tell the waitress wittily that she better warn the desserts chef that you're in town and feelin mean.  Hahahahahaha.  The salad arrives, complete with some class of haute cuisinepungent dressing, and you tuck in.  

But this is where the lettuce, like anything living, starts reacting to its self-preservation instinct by trying to kill you.  The leaf latches alien like to the top of your windpipe, with a determination and intensity that even Ripley would succumb to.  The leaf, paper like, vibrates in the most irritatingly tickelish manner as you breath in and out.  You embark on a bout of coughing of ever increasing intensity, as the lettuce goes in for the kill, until you sound like a dying hound.  Your eyes start watering in sympathy, and every time you look at a candle you see the most fantastic rainbow.  When you look at the girl you asked out, that poor unfortunate girl, who's date appears to be expiring from a cronic case of hooping cough, you see her as if through a rain covered window pane.  The only cure is to stop talking and breath only when unavoidable, in the hope that the lettuce leaf will relax when it becomes apparant that its life is not being threatened and that it will wander stomachwards where it can be ambushed and subdued by your guerilla digestive fluids.

This ambush, embarrasingly, can take 10 minutes to arrive, during which time you appear like an ashpyxiated mute, and your date is attempting to keep the conversation going while you, articulate as ever, nod and smile a teary smile in acknowledgment of everything she says. Repeated attempts to flush the savage lettuce leaf out by drinking 3 glasses of water eventually pay off, and you hear his dying scream as he enters the trap.  

Much relieved to be able to speak again, and feeling that you have a bit to make up on the conversation side, you begin a period of high-speed story telling over your recently served steak ( too well done, but there you go ) to show that you have actually got sufficient co-ordination to speak AND eat at the SAME TIME.

You choose chocolate cake for dessert and perform, unconsciously, your Homer Simpson impression and soon the teary smile you wore a few minutes before is replaced by a chocolate-smeared bloated leer.  Coffee gives you time to relax and an opportunity to perform probing throat clearing actions to make sure the lettuce isn't going to make an improbable last gasp attack like you usually see in the movies.  Nope, things are looking up, as you vow to become whatever is the opposite to a vegetarian.  Its only good, juciy, tender and very very dead meat for you from here on in.