Floored again by the old ‘elevator pitch’

Jennifer calls me with news of the perfect man, someone she’d met at a charity event. He wants to go out on a blind date. With me. Breathlessly, she spills the stats: a successful lawyer with his own practice, a newly minted divorce, heavy into volunteer work and tall, “dashingly handsome and All-American.” That, and he has a golden retriever. Have I died and gone to blind-date heaven?

We make a plan to meet, Jennifer and me, the blind date and a friend. Only the date and I show, but he’s easy to spot. He’s tall, all right. Dashingly handsome. But perhaps not my type. Oh, that sounds horrible -- I banish my catty, judgmental self and walk over and make my introduction.

He is a lawyer, yes, but he hates it. He’s not exactly divorced: “It will be final in a few months.” And thus begins a diatribe on his lazy, alimony-grubbing, soon-to-be ex-wife. He’s 52 to my 33. I’m no ageist, but slam the ex and -- remember this, boys -- you look like a jerk. Period.

And the dog? He likes retrievers but hasn’t had one since Carter was in office. But he does volunteer: “To be honest, I volunteer so I can meet women.”

Everything feels wrong, and during our talk, I can’t help but sense that he’s just as disappointed. So I dare to ask. What’d Jennifer tell you about me?

“That you look exactly like that girl from the show ‘Medium’ ... what’s her name ... Patricia Arquette. And you like older guys, and you live between New York and Los Angeles, and you’re very sweet, and you never want to get married or be dependent on a man. You need your freedom.”

Heck, I’d date me too!

As he lays it out, I know what happened: We both got a botched Elevator Pitch.

Jennifer was somewhat right -- I live in New York and also spend a considerable time in my previous home, Los Angeles. And yes, I am tall and blond, but I’m no Patricia Arquette. I’m sweet, except for the second Monday of every month and four days before that, when you’d better run for the hills. And of course, I don’t want to get married -- unless it’s to the right person.

In my bicoastal experience, both Los Angeles and New York, as well as in environs in between, the Elevator Pitch is a constant. Because everything is a negotiation, everything is a deal, and there just isn’t time to start with a tabula rasa and slowly fill in the picture. You need it fast. You need it now. And so people get reduced to the Elevator Pitch. The key facts and just the facts. What we’re about, where we’ve been and what we want.

The Elevator Pitch works fine on the Young, who can often be summarized in a few words. But as you get older, life becomes more complex -- and so do you. And it thus becomes easy for the Elevator Pitch to become more of a projection of the self we want to be than an actual accounting of the truth. Think of it as aspirational versus actual. And unfortunately, aspirational isn’t tolerated past a certain age.

Case in point: I remember a fabulous guy I dated when I was 22, as was he. He wanted to be an actor, make lots of money and change the world. I thought he was amazing. He was going to save the rain forests; he was like a character from “The Motorcycle Diaries.” He could recite Joan Didion and “Ulysses” in a snap; he would sing Van Morrison’s “Queen of the Slipstream” to me in a hushed whisper. He was sexy not because of his looks but because of his absolute dedication to his future course.

March forward 10 years. I met another actor, who was 32, who also wanted to become famous and make lots of money so he could change the world. He wanted to help strengthen child-labor laws in Third World countries and act in Tom Stoppard plays; in the interim, he worked at a car dealership and waited tables at night. The difference between the former and the latter: One held promise, the other embodied the cold reality of dreams not yet realized, with a ticking clock of time running out at rapid pace. Same Elevator Pitch as Guy A -- but his had fallen a few floors.

But back to my friend Jennifer. “What were you thinking, woman?” I ask.

“Laura, you were so eager to meet someone, and so was he, that the best thing that I could do was to connect you and see what happened,” she tells me.

I think about this for a minute. In the end, we all get to where we need to be. But next time, I’ll take the stairs.

Laura Galloway can be reached at weekend@latimes.com.

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