20 Years in 28 Days: A Marriage in Music
Day #11: Miki Howard—“Baby Be Mine”
by Mark Anthony Neal
If you were to ask me, I’d suggest that I have tried choreograph every aspect of my adult life, for better or worse. That was not the case in the fall of 1987, as I was scuffling along trying to figure out my next move, professionally and personally. The lifeline was random phone call in late November. As I’ve come to understand it, my future wife was at her job at the NYU bookstore when one of her colleagues, and older Black woman, implored her to call me, on the basis that “I owed her a dinner.” When she called to touch base, I was surprised, maybe even shocked, but knew to take advantage of the opportunity.
We set up a date, a Friday night. Dinner at the Dallas BBQ in 8th Street, the movie was Nuts with Barbara Streisand and Richard Dreyfuss. She wore a white sweater, beige knit pants, and brown knee length boots. By all accounts the date itself was a success. The trip home has been some subject of debate over the past 23½ Years. I had prepared a cassette take specifically for the outing—the opening song on the cassette, which I still possess was Miki Howard’s “Baby Be Mine,” which still has a special place in my heart. Also remember Prince’s “Forever in My Life” was also on that tape.
It was a rainy night and I was driving my first car, a light blue Chevy Nova—the one that was built on the Toyota Corolla—the same car that would drive us to our first post-marriage residence in Fredonia, New York in 1991. As such I didn’t quite understand the air circulation thing yet; couldn’t quite figure out how to un-fog my windshield as we drove up the Westside highway.
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| named mine "Louise" |
Amazingly we made it back to the Bronx in one piece. There was a quick peck on the lips, and as I recall it, she ran out of my car, at least that’s how I described it to FP the next day. I wasn’t sure that I would see her again. She of course has no memory of it going down that way, as it has become one of the seminal events in our relationship that we have conflicting opinions about what happened. Another was our first meeting with our oldest daughter, who was less than two weeks old when we first met her and I swear that at that age she already had the dexterity to pull my glasses off my eyes. The wife simply says that they fell off in my nervousness and perhaps it was that same nervousness that has gotten the better of my memories and about that first date in 1987. Thankfully it wasn’t the last.
