After putting out a call to you readers last week to send me your best and worst pick-up lines, I went through my mailbag and came up with ... dust. Nada, zilch, nothing.

Come on, folks! You're here, so I know you can read, and writing is the next step up from that. How hard can it be to pick up a pen? Send those lines to me here at the Weekly so we can get started on Dr. Love's First Annual Official Dating Pick-up Line Guide. I'm open to suggestions, I'm easy, I'm cheap and I'm worth it. I'll even change the name of the guide if you want, name it after the first person to write to me, but somebody's got to write to me before I can do that. We're all in this together, folks, so let's get cracking!

Okay, that takes care of the public service announcements. Let's get on with the story that has you all hanging on the edge of your seats. Slide back in that chair, back away from the edge where you might get hurt if you fall off, and get comfortable. Here we go with the final chapter of the saga of Chuck and Pat...

It's Monday night as I write this and I've just gotten home from LAX, where I watched her board a flight back to Switzerland. We spent a total of eight days together while she was here, had a lot of fun, did the tourist things, worked as extras in a new Kevin Costner movie (Ed. Note: "My Bodyguard"), reminisced about old times and... came to the conclusion that high school was a long time ago.

Thomas Wolfe said "You can't go home again." On the surface, that quote would seem to apply to my situation with Pat, but what most people don't realize is that there was a error in the transcription when it first came out. What Wolfe really wrote was "You can't go to Rome again." He'd been kicked out of Italy and banned from ever returning and he was telling his friends what the Immigration people had told him. That's a little-known fact from your doctor. A little off the subject, maybe, but informative nonetheless.

In any event, the accepted version does apply. Pat and I spent time together ten years ago and we both have fond memories of it, but we're different people now and the spark just isn't there anymore. She's changed, I've changed; our lives are going in different directions. We've spent more than a week together now, 24 hours a day, and we agree that whatever it is we feel for each other, it isn't likely to grow into love. On the up-side, though, we've become good friends and it's a relationship I expect to last. As Bogie said to Bergman in Casablanca, "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." (Ed. Note: And it was. We still exchange email.)

Why am I telling you all this? Because this is a dating column and I think it's important that I form a connection with you readers. I don't want this to be something you skim through for a few laughs and then forget about, I want it to be something that can help us both in our search for the perfect mate. Don't kid yourself -- we're all searching, whether we admit it to ourselves or not. It doesn't matter if you're the six-foot tall bronzed Adonis with the washboard stomach or the kid with Coke-bottle glasses, pimples and big ears in the back of the classroom; we're all looking for that certain someone and it helps to have friends to talk to. That's why I'm spilling my personal life all over these pages -- I want to be real to you. So I tell you how my search is coming and I hope you'll tell me about yours. And if you can learn from my experiences -- or if I can learn from yours -- then we're batting .500, and that'll get you a tryout on any team.

FOREPLAY
What's the deal with all these dating shows on TV lately? The Dating Game was the first, then came Love Connection, and now we've got Studs (What a name!). The people on these shows always try to be the ultimate man or woman -- they're always talking about how they date 5,000 times a week, they hang out at trendoid clubs, and somehow they always end up taking a walk on the beach in the moonlight at the end of the date. I've been to the beach at night -- it's too damned cold and windy to be romantic and you're always looking over your shoulder for gang members. I just don't buy it.

I'd like to see a new TV dating show, one that reflects Real Life. We could call it Slugs and have normal people on it. Guests would go out for pizza and a movie and then come on the show to tell about how awkward things got at the front door at the end of the date. Nobody named Dirk or Tiffany would be allowed and anybody wearing Italian suits would be shot.

I think it'd win the ratings every week...