How It All Began …

Written by Tommy

So, ChiChi and I met on August 9th, 2019 through Whitney (my cousin’s line sister) at a happy hour birthday party held at Ninja City.

At this point in my life, I had just moved to Cleveland for about a month and I could count on one hand the number of people I knew in the city. This was the first time I met Whitney, so I ended up waiting for her inside the restaurant because I didn’t want to awkwardly introduce myself to people I didn’t know, outside on the patio. We go to the outside patio where the party is, and I get introduced to everyone there.

That’s when I met ChiChi - I don’t quite remember what she was wearing but man - she looked great!

So we are all casually drinking and I end up talking to ChiChi for some time up at the bar, really getting to know one another and it was great. In a normal situation when two people first meet, this is where they usually exchange numbers, go back to being social with everyone at the party, and then call it a night. If you’re lucky you maybe start texting the same night.

However, this is where ChiChi and I differ from the rest …

Suddenly, I had to urge to tell her something crazy —

I told ChiChi that I really wanted to see her the following evening for a date - but I already had a date scheduled in the afternoon that I didn’t want to go to.

So I asked ChiChi if she could be my excuse to get out of staying on the other date for the night.

ChiChi looked at me crazy — but agreed on one condition: that I buy her and her friends drag brunch tickets for that upcoming Sunday …

Keep in mind I JUST MET CHICHI, TICKETS WERE LIKE $200 AND I NEVER DROP THIS MUCH WITHIN AN HOUR — but … I agreed! The rest of the group joined us and we continued to talk and play board games. ChiChi leaves for a second and then the night gets even more interesting …

ChiChi comes back inside with this guy she is talking to at the time — Bruh 😒… Just think — this guy was like M’Baku from Black Panther, but light-skinned, not quite as tall, with short hair, and a nice smile.

I go over to introduce myself because I’m still in the “making friends” stage in Cleveland. He dapped me up and it hurt my hand — he definitely did that on purpose. In my head, I was like, “How am I going to compete with that? I definitely can’t beat him in a fight and I’m not going to grow 6 inches taller overnight. How do I show my dominance and impress ChiChi?”

And that’s when I came up with the perfect way - Connect Four. I was going to use my smarts to impress ChiChi and beat him. So I invite “light-skinned M’Baku” to play with me and he agrees, but I up the bet by saying the loser has to buy a round of shots but take double if they lose. So we ended up playing 6 games or so - and he didn’t win one game; side note - my win percentage is 92% lifetime in Connect Four. What I didn’t know was “light-skinned M’Baku” began to get really mad that I was beating him. He took off his jacket and paced back and forth at one point, getting irritated by when I told him he lost after only 4 moves.

I felt great that he was leaving a loser and I would be able to spend more time with ChiChi!

… But my plan backfired, and she ended up leaving with him.

I refused to give up though — I got ChiChi’s number before she left and I continued texting her the entire night until we both went to sleep ...

We ended up spending the entire weekend together doing other fun things including going to Lake Erie, eating local BBQ and of course — the drag brunch I financed. A lot of people think this story is wild and made up. But it’s not - we have witnesses.

Many thanks to Dylan, owner of Ninja City! He provided space for us to enjoy time with our friends and is an integral piece of our love story.

I’m so happy I decided to go to happy hour ...