Not only does it lack class, it can lead to potentially dangerous situations, even in places other than the Botanic Gardens. A few years ago, a lady whom I had met at a friend's wedding (we were both in the wedding party) had expressed some interest in me and was having a party outside of Philadelphia, to which I was invited. As I had recently broken up with my long-term girlfriend, and wasn't handling it all that well emotionally, I was ready to pursue a new potential romance. It gratified my bruised ego that she was interested, and she seemed like a nice enough person; I figured there was enough potential for it to develop into something more. My friend, who loved any excuse to party, went along with me (the lady I was interested in and my friend's wife were college friends). There's a rest stop with a bathroom and picnic benches on the Delaware River between NJ and Pennsylvania, and we stopped there briefly. If you could disregard the 18-wheel trucks that parked there, or the sound of cars racing by on the highway, it was a pretty spot, with lots of trees. As I pulled my car out, I noticed a corpulent couple, half-undressed on one of the picnic benches, apparently having sex. I had never seen anything so blatant (or, considering the physical condition of the copulators, so repellent), and couldn't tear my eyes away. Neither could my friend. Unfortunately, I hadn't taken my foot off the gas pedal, and slammed up over the curb, doing substantial damage to the underside of my vehicle. Shaken, I used my friend's cell-phone to call AAA. Nearly an hour later, a tow-truck showed up (the corpulent copulators had disappeared in the interim) and towed me into Bristol, a grimy industrial city I had never been in before, where I managed to rent a car. Using my friend's cell-phone again, I called the lady, apologized profusely, and then, with some embarrassment and trepidation, related what had happened to us, sanitizing it as much as I could. She laughed and told me that if my friend had related such a story, she never would have believed it, but she was convinced of my trustworthiness. As I hung up, my friend (who had hit his head on the roof when we had our "accident" and claimed to have a pounding headache as a result) said, "We're still going to the party, right?" He looked crestfallen when I informed him with some heat that, no, we weren't going to the party-- we were going back home. I had had all the excitement I wanted for that night, at least.
