I once had the great pleasure to work with a charming and delightful European intern. This beautiful and cultured young lady took pleasure teaching me the finer ways of a well-bred woman while I opened her eyes to fine American fast food cuisine.

Stylishly dressed and infinitely more world traveled than this old gal, she demonstrated self-restraint and ten times more class than the American cohorts in our office. From poise to dress to manners of gestures and speech, it would take me an additional lifetime to be the gum under her Louboutins.

Where I dressed for comfort, in jeans and a t-shirt, I learned that in my friend’s upper level of society, it is considered disrespectful to the family for a woman to be seen in public wearing play clothes. Her maid, she said, dressed better than the average American woman even when she cleaned the toilette.

Americans, I told her, tend to be okay with casual wear. We go to the gym, then to the bank in our sweaty and ripe Spandex and sneakers, then the grocery store in the same and think nothing of it.

It only took us one semester to corrupt her. She was at home visiting for the holidays and had gone to the gym. From there she made a quick stop for coffee, still in her gym clothes, where she ran into a relative. By the time my friend got home her mother had received phone calls wondering if something was wrong. Was her daughter ill? On drugs?

To my own mother’s credit, she suggested I change my underwear daily.

She often threatened to send me to Mrs. Brown’s Finishing School to learn ladylike manners. I maintain Mrs. Brown, if she even existed, would charge too much for my mother to extract measurable value from her investment in polishing my tomboy ways.

In contrast, there was something very sensuous about my European friend’s packaging that I found attractive. Her beautiful scarves were artfully knotted and tied. Fashion shoes and hosiery complemented her blouses, sweaters and skirts. Her outfits pressed and pleated. Every day her twisted hair bun or up-sweep meant she’d taken more time to look presentable that I did for my graduation photo (and it shows).

American women tend to dress in competition with other women, which she said was just silly. European women on the other hand are deeper in their desire to attract a man, and exude great confidence and delight in their ability to twist a handsome suitor into a frenzy. The hell with the other women!

In the world of love and lust, Americans fail there, too. She gave me a pass on this one because I was already married. She’d missed the opportunity to school me on couture fashion but felt she could offer a few insights on the simple art of seduction. She thought it interesting that I really only dated one guy all my life. I stretched my experience to include a handful of high school “dates” and later a few flirtations to appear more well-rounded in love relationships. Which was a joke.

But to my young intern, the extent to which her culture grooms women in the practice of dating, and I’m guessing, sex, is something taught as a rite of passage. In America, we learn social inter-play from reality television, which is anything but real life. Growing up I learned everything there was to know about boys and sex from the pictures in Tiger Beat magazine.

To demonstrate her lesson on love and sensuality, in a context I’d relate to, my cultured friend opened a bag of Dove dark chocolates.

These small delightfully smooth and creamy treasures are wrapped in foil with cutesy messages printed inside.  My friend proved that every message in a Dove chocolate could be enhanced by adding the words “IN BED”.  She’d tape dozens of these to my computer monitor and over time created a force field of lust that made it hard to concentrate. “Read them every day and then go home to your husband,” she said. I swear she winked at me.

Today without much thought I grabbed a package of Dove dark chocolates at the store and laughed, thinking of my old dear friend. I opened one candy and read the message: “Lend an ear. And a chocolate.”  With a black Sharpie pen I wrote, “IN BED”. Then I opened another. “Kiss and Tell” it said. I wrote “IN BED”. And another: “Solve arguments with a dance-off” and I wrote “IN BED”. I opened every one of the Dove candies in the package and wrote “IN BED” after each one and they totally made sense.

So to my adorable, passionate European friend, lover of all things sweet and beautiful, thank you for teaching me so much. I know how to fashion a silk scarf and do not wear Spandex to the coffee shop. Today I remembered you fondly and laughed out loud, IN BED.

#EatPlayDove

BE F-G AWESOME TODAY!
Image: Stephanie DelTorchio