How Phil Lesh Met His Wife

Online dating certainly isn't the only way to meet Mr. or Miss Right. I often advise people to just be friendly everywhere they go, whether it's to a bar or the dry cleaners.

Apparently this technique paid off for Phil Lesh, the cutish bassist from the Grateful Dead. Here's how he describes how he met his wife in his very excellent book, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead:

"For some time, I'd been eating my breakfast at a little place in San Rafael (where I'd moved after leaving Fairfax): the Station Cafe, owned by old friends, Mark and his wife, Karen. One morning just before Halloween (during the six-week break between Europe 2 and our East Coast tour), I was sitting at the counter there, gloomily muttering mindrot into a handheld voice recorder I'd brought in Edinburgh. My breakfast arrived, brought in by my regular waitress, Jill, a slim young woman with warm brown eyes whom I'd gotten to know slightly over recent months. Without thinking (or even saying thank you) I pushed the record button, said, 'And here's Jill's phone number,' and held up the little machine for her to respond. After a startled glance, as if she'd never really seen me before, she clearly enunciated a number into the recorder --one that I knew (and she knew that I knew) was the number of the cafe where we were sitting--and finished with a little smile, as if to say, 'Your move.' I muttered something like 'nice save' or 'better luck next time' as I forced a smile and turned to my breakfast. But after that I kept thinking that she was looking at me a little differently than before. Not that I looked like much of a prize, thank you very much, with my booze-for-breakfast habits, puffy face, and thirty pounds of beer belly."

You'll be glad to know that Phil gave up drinking a long time ago. From his account, he and Jill remain in love and have been married for over two decades. They have two sons.