“He would deny me!” exclaimed Lisa Pilot when asked to describe the “meet-cute” that almost wasn’t with her fiancé, Gregory Slaughter.
Both were regulars at Norman’s Bistro, the popular Black-owned restaurant in Chicago’s historic Bronzeville neighborhood.
“We would always run into each other,” recalled Pilot, a former model now self-employed in real estate management. “So one day, he said, ‘Hey, can I take you to dinner?’”
She agreed, and the two stayed close that evening, talking and dancing. Later, “he called … and then that was it,” she told theGrio. “No show, no, nothing.”
Still, the two continued to cross paths and discover mutual connections — “[but] every time I would say to people, ‘Hey, I know him,’ he’s like, ‘Oh no, I don’t know who she is,’” Pilot laughed. “He denied me to my [twin] brother; he denied me to everybody. And finally, I saw him out again at Norman’s, and I was walking by, and he’s like, ‘Hey.’ I was like, ‘Uh-uh — no.’”
Slaughter, an author and ERP consultant for businesses and educational institutions like Howard University, remembers things a little differently.
“I kept bumping into people who knew her, but I didn’t know her know her, you know what I mean? So when we finally did bump into each other that last time … I, of course, had not taken her to dinner, and I said I wanted to —”
“He didn’t think I was gonna go with him,” Lisa interjected.
“I didn’t think she would be serious about me; that’s just the bottom line,” he admitted. “I never did, and that’s why I didn’t reply, because I was like, ‘Yeah, she’s probably way above my pay level.”
Nevertheless, “We got to talking, and we had a good time,” said Slaughter, who gathered up the nerve to ask Lisa out again, “and this time, I invited her to dinner at my home.”
“The dinner was amazing,” she said.
Their…
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