Trivia at Joe's.

The cute blond waiter at Joe's on Juniper, the one who waited on my non-date with Nick last month, smiled at me tonight. He did this while I was sitting with my friend Debi - the most popular heterosexual woman in gay Atlanta - and the gang playing team trivia for the first time since my non-date with Nick.

Apparently unsure of what to do when he smiled, the cute blond waiter says I grimaced as though annoyed and turned away from him.

He told me that this is what I did. He told me this after I said hello to him after my team won and credited me with the victory.

Encouraged by the victory, I said, "Hello," to the cute blond waiter, and he looked around to see who I was talking to.

"When you said hello it surprised me because I didn't think you would say hello to me," he said to me. "Not after you made that face at me earlier."

"What face?" I asked, asserting that I didn't make a face at him.

Then, to show me the face I made, he made this uncomfortable-looking half-smirk partial-eye-dart thing. I can see me doing that. But I would make that face if I was afraid that I'd been caught looking at someone who probably didn't want me to look at them.

"You were probably just doing something else," he said.

I told him that I wouldn't make that face at him. In fact, I told him that I just tried to make eye contact with him everytime he walked by, then I said, "Not that I was watching you walk by ..." Which I intended as an obvious lie.

He congratulated me on my team's victory. I kept talking, though, and he disappeared on me while I paid my ticket.

But he was bussing tables, so I couldn't make it up to him. Not that there's anything to make amends for. He walked away.

I got his name. Whatever it is.

I think I blew it with him, though, because ...

1) I didn't realize that I did anything.
2) I didn't realize that a communicated smile was even a possibility between me and the Joe's waiter who wasn't my official waiter tonight.
3) Not realizing that it was a possibility, I didn't realize that you could blow such a thing.
4) I was KIDDING about not looking at him. I was TOTALLY looking at him. And I would SO smile back. I wouldn't have made a face at him. Not intentionally. I just wouldn't have thought that he would actually look at me and smile. Which is probably the problem.
5) So he was looking at me. And smiled. And I thought I smiled back. In fact, I'm sure of it. He's cute and funny.

Oh well. Not a big deal. I'm letting it go ... because MY TEAM WON!!! MY TEAM WON AND SAID THAT IT WAS BECAUSE I WAS THERE!!!

WE BEAT 26 OTHER TEAMS!!!

All because I knew that Ray Combs was the name of the game show host who committed suicide in the 1990s by hanging himself with hospital bedsheets while he was under suicide watch at a psychiatric facility.

Debi seemed impressed, and her son Ian seemed to be having fun. And the other guy there, whose name was John or James, kept looking at me like I was some sort of freakish savant for knowing that Tom Petty was in the Traveling Wilburys and that Greg Evigan was in "My Two Dads."

(At one point, they told me that, if it ended in a tiebreaker, I was the designated team spokesman because, as Ian put it, "the rest of us haven't answered shit." Which wasn't true, but he was nice for saying it.)

We won $50 or something like that!

So Debi told me that I'm required to come back next week, when we're going to spend the gift certificate we won.