Listen to the whole show where Sarah and Brian first met

It was October 5th, 2019 at the Fox Theater in Oakland, CA where the legendary psychedelic bluegrass band The String Cheese Incident were playing the second of a two-night run in the infamous Bay Area town. Chance would have it that both Sarah and Brian were at the same show that night, each with their own ragtag group of hippie buddies, doing their hippie thang.

Rumor has it during the first set of interstellar bluegrass that night, while cutting it up on the dance floor, Sarah peered through the energetic crowd to catch the sight of Brian grooving hard. And without so much as missing a beat, Sarah mentally checked off her first and most important box in the consideration of a potential mate: that long-haired fella had “moves.”

Cue stage left, after the show, approximately 11:30 PM PST—that’s when Brian first caught Sarah’s eye. Brian—100% totally and completely sober at the time—lingered his gaze on her, and it was then, magically, that Sarah gave him the proverbial sign: She looked over her shoulder at him a second time, and smiled.

Well, that was all Brian needed to see. Steadily—and again, with just the utmost of priest-like sobriety—he walked right up to Sarah and introduced himself. The numbers fired out from his cellphone's silicon-spring screen like comets as he entered the digits Sarah’s sweet voice had just provided. “I’ll text you,” he told her, or some such, as all the kids say these days.

And never one to procrastinate, Brian did text her—within about 90 seconds. 

And never too quick to react to the dings and pings of modern technology, Sarah did not respond. 

And so the days passed without Brian hearing back from the beautiful woman from Oakland who lived only as a specter in his phone now: Sarah Crazy Cute Met At Cheese.

Days turned into weeks, and one of the starkest fogs Brian had ever experienced descended over his downtown San Francisco apartment.

Until one afternoon about a month or so after the show when Sarah was catching up on 3 or 7 or 30 or so unread text messages and she spotted a message from someone identified in her phone only as Dreamboat, and she mounted her destined response.

For it was not what Sarah texted back to Brian that told Brian certifiably yes, she was the one, this woman was the one! Or rather, it wasn’t the substance of what she said.

No, instead it was her deft use of the semicolon, the all-but-forgotten punctuation mark placed just so amongst her deliberate words, all of it sent within the container of the modern-day text message, a communication format that had become so dumbed down over the years that Brian—a dejected man of letters—damn near expected to see riddled with intentional and ironic misspellings by this point in his life.

But Sarah’s response had come rebelliously barring a semicolon, a relic of a forgotten time, a repudiation of all the grammatical damage that modern-day technology had waged on their generation’s dating world.

This woman, Brian realized, was different…

As for Sarah? What was it about Brian that earned her infamously rare and highly sought-after text-message response?

With a sly grin on her face, she maintains to this day: “It was his moves.”