Okay: quick refresher. I am a divorced woman in midlife who has struggled to date successfully. I hired the fabulous dating coach Annie Gleason and she turned my life around.

I had some successes, got to meet more men with her guidance, and landed a wonderful relationship. And then he told me he’d met the love his life (bummer; it wasn’t me).

Cue the wailing, the bargaining, the endless phone calls to my best friend. Once I got it through my system, back into the dating jungle I went.

But I couldn’t face the online dating world just yet. It reminded me how I met the guy I was still trying to forget. I wanted something different.

I wondered if I was missing something. Annie’s training back in the day included homework. And this homework included meeting men in real life situations and talking with them. Flirting even. Who knows? Maybe go on a date.

That’s it!

I’ll go ‘off the grid’ and do all that homework again – and even the stuff I skipped first time around.

Well, hello!

Fast forward to the other night. As you recall, I’d just unwittingly crashed a private Vegas clam bake and got busted. That’s when the young guy next to me makes a snorting kind of noise and I looked his way.

Ah, youth. Justin is possibly in his very early 30s. Looks to be maybe Filipino or something close. He’s perfectly dressed business casual and staring at his phone.

“Looks like I just blew it,” I say.

“Don’t sweat it,” says he.

Okay. Now what?

Silence. His phone demands a great deal of concentration. I sip my Margarita.

Now, this is typically where I would take my (free!) drink and shrink away into the evening, down the palm tree’d pathway and past the fake waterfalls — straight back to my hotel room to watch ‘Big Bang Theory’ reruns.

Dammit! No! I came here for a reason. I’m completing my mission tonight. I’m having a conversation with this guy.

What would a Hollywood script have me do? Think Addie, think….

“You’re awful quiet … don’t tell me you’re crashing this party too?”

He laughs (phew!)

“No, no, I’m here to work. I’m the social media coordinator for the company that’s putting this party on.”

So this explains his nose in the phone. Got it.

And so it goes. We talk about the young kids back at my office who do social media breezily all day and how do you guys do it? According to Justin (oh, yes, I’ve asked his name), it’s got a lot to do with snappy headlines. This leads us to a long critique of today’s ‘journalism’ versus long-ago gumshoe reporting (turns out he has a degree in communications).

By now I’m really liking Justin. Alas, he is too young. So all the next things I might’ve done — touched him on his forearm when making a salient point about how ‘yellow journalism’ got its name, or touched my hair when he said something funny — it just ain’t gonna happen.

(Stop your thoughts right there. No cougaring. I have kids in college. Guys like Justin will always and forever remind me of their friends they’d bring home to play Gameboy. I mean, eeeeew.)

Oh no. Here comes that waitress again. The one who told me to leave. She looks at me, impatient and confused. She’s holding a forbidden plate of crawfish, clams, potatoes and corn on the cob.

“Ma’am? This is a private party!”

I’m feeling saucy (and one margaritar-y). I stick my thumb out toward Justin. “I’m with him.”

Justin nods.

The plate of seafood wonderfullness is mine!