Terri amp; Charlie Happiness is proving 2 of 3 adages wrong
- January
- 3
12:41 am Nation Live
%26#149;Never fall in love with a musician.
The last adage was courtesy of Terri’s grandmother and aunts, all of whom had fallen in love with musicians, only to discover that their men had difficulty dating one woman at a time.
So that February, Terri found herself in a Los Angeles bar, the Derby. She wasn’t looking for love because her last boyfriend had dumped her unceremoniously that day to return to his old girlfriend. She was there to dance away her blues.
The Jumpin’ Jimes were playing that night. At some point, the percussionist, Charlie Lake, had asked Terri if she had a boyfriend.
“No,” she said.
“Do you want one?”
“Sure,” she replied, “why not?”
Terri, a legal secretary, handed her phone number to Charlie, and the two began to date. Casually. Charlie was dating four women. It seems Terri’s aunts knew what they were talking about.
The situation was fine with Terri. For a while.
Terri impressed Charlie, particularly when she scored hard-to-get NBA playoff tickets; Charlie was a huge Seattle SuperSonics fan.
Get those tickets and I’ll marry you, he had told her. Through connections that blow his mind to this day, she found tickets to a suite for the Sonics game against the Los Angeles Lakers in LA.
“When she did that, I was kind of like, ‘Uhhhhhh.’ I was kind of hemming and hawing,” Charlie said. “She knew that was a joke, right?”
Charlie, who describes himself as “an absolute goober” about Disneyland, invited Terri to the amusement park. “It was a test,” he said. “I’d taken every other girl I’d dated to Disneyland, and they all failed. They’d want to shop while I would be running from ride to ride. Mind you, I don’t mind waiting for two hours to go on the Indiana Jones ride. But the girls were always like, ‘The line is too long, it’s too cold, too rainy.’ Terri hung with me all the way.”
After dating for six months, things weren’t fine anymore with Charlie’s serial dating, Terri said. “He would say he didn’t want to get serious, but he would flip out if I was dancing with a guy.”
One evening when she forced the issue, Charlie admitted, “I think I’m falling in love with you.”
They moved in together. Terri became pregnant and Charlie proposed.
“She turned me down,” Charlie recalled. Explained Terri, “I thought, ‘How dare you; you think you’re obligated, but you’re not.’ ”
The tough-gal routine wouldn’t last, and the two were wed Nov. 20, 1998, nine months after they had met.
The couple moved to the Valley in July 2004. Terri, 39, is a substitute teacher and a legal secretary but is seeking work as a crime-scene technician. Charlie, 33, plays in the Bullseye Band and teaches general music and choir at Avondale Elementary School. They have two daughters and live in Tolleson.
“I can now say that, yes, love comes when you’re not looking, you could possibly meet your true love in a bar, and it’s OK to date a musician,” Terri said. Charlie “brings out the positiveness in me,” she added.
Charlie said of Terri, “I still find out things about her that makes me think that ‘Wow, I didn’t know that.’ That makes me realize she’s the most amazing person I’ve ever met.”
Reach the reporter at sonja.haller@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8998.
Tags: amp, day, disney, grandmother, Live, love, music, old girl, routRelated posts
