We met over dinner in the chadar ochel during staff week.  It turned out that Deena was friends with a girl I had known in USY and I sat down, ostensibly with her, and impressed Deena by making the other girl laugh throughout dinner.  Apparently, she was known among her friends as a sourpuss, so Deena grossly over-estimated my powers of humor.

That night Deena was asked out by my best friend. He wanted to get her ice cream at the Red Rooster, 19 miles outside of camp on Rt. 22. He had no car and I had my father’s, which I was forbidden to loan to anyone, so I volunteered to drive them (and another friend who managed to worm his way into what had been a threesome).

At the Red Rooster I noticed that Deena, who was and is quite thin, was shivering from the cold.  In an inspired moment in which my synapses became entangled with those of an entirely different person, I offered her something warm.  She gratefully accepted my smelly old Levi’s jacket, my most prized possession.  On the way back to camp, I got a flat tire right outside a rowdy bar (now, I believe, a church).  Drunken townies were everywhere and the fourth member of our foursome decided to treat the flat as an opportunity to imitate Mario Andretti’s pit crew at Indy and change the thing within a minute or two.

An hour later we were still there, my best friend was oily and cranky from the tire, and Deena was my girlfriend.

(Deena’s brother Eric is also a Ramah Berkshires marriage – you can read his story by clicking here).