Lifestyle
L.A. Affairs: An LAX flirtation had me on cloud nine. Could we land the plane?
My brother dropped me off curbside at Los Angeles International Airport and yelled, “Run!” Our timing getting to LAX was thwarted by the kind of notorious L.A. traffic that airline change fees and crushed dreams are made of. Departure to Newark, N.J., was at 8:05 a.m.
It was 7:25 a.m.
I raced through the terminal and up the escalator, two steps at a time, with a carry-on and boots that were not made for running. The line to get through security was a mile long.
“Am I going to make it?” I deliriously asked the TSA agent as I handed him my boarding pass, shaking from the mad dash.
Without a word, he whisked me past a serpentine of travelers and straight to the metal detector. I was baffled. Maybe he was psychic. I thanked him profusely and kept running.
I couldn’t miss this flight.
My mother insisted I fly “home” to New Jersey for my birthday — her treat. I was deep into a drifting divorce, disillusioned, depressed and avoiding the other “D” word … dating. I also was hiding from the unwelcome advances once the word got out. I felt perpetual dread and I felt wobbly. “Snap out of it,” Cher kept telling me in my mind.
By the time I got to Gate 40, I was giddy from shock and out of breath. I looked around and exhaled.
To my left was a tall, bald man wearing glasses and a tweed blazer. He looked familiar. “Who is that?” I whispered to the also tall, handsome man to my right, holding a coffee cup and wondering if I was talking to him.
He looked at me quizzically and squinted: “Isn’t that the guy who wrote ‘L.A. Confidential’?”
Bingo. Impressive. But neither one of us could remember his name. It was fun trying.
Suddenly, I felt compelled to tell this lovely man how close I came to missing the flight, how much traffic there was, how fast I ran, in boots with a heel, and how I imagined he‘d probably experienced the same exact thing minus the boots.
No. He had gotten there hours before, breezed through security and was on his third cup of coffee.
Boarding started. It felt like we both wished there were more time. “It was nice talking with you. Have a great trip,” I said and meant it.
“You too,” he said, smiling back.
Sparks flew.
After the in-flight movie ended, I looked up, and there he was. I waved; I was glad to see him again. I thought he was on his way to the restroom. He wasn’t. He‘d come to find me. It was good I had an aisle seat.
For the next two hours, we dove in, surrounded by strangers.
He’d spent the last few years in L.A. dating around since his divorce. He seemed as universally disillusioned as I was and had told his mom a few days before that he was giving up.
At one point, he knelt down in the aisle to get closer. His salt-and-pepper cool felt warm. He touched my shoulder a few times. I didn’t mind. He was confident, funny and very much a grown man who also seemed impervious to heavy turbulence.
People in the rows nearby could hear everything we were saying. Some were staring. Some climbed over him. Then the beverage cart came butting in. We made plans to have dinner when we returned to L.A. He gave me his card.
“That was incredible,” said the woman next to me, who had pretended to be asleep to give us some privacy. It was incredible. A big cloud lifted. I couldn’t stop smiling.
When I got to baggage claim, there he was again. I told him my mom was coming to pick me up. “Can I meet your mom?”
Her SUV was waiting exactly where we exited. She ran out to hug me and open the liftgate, wondering who this guy was carrying my luggage.
“Mom, this is Mark. We met on the plane,” I said.
“Hi, I’m your daughter’s new boyfriend,” he said as if it were already true.
Without missing a beat, she shot back: “Good, because you’re very handsome.” We said goodbye in a flurry.
“What happened to you on that flight? You’re different. You’re going to marry him,” my mom said emphatically.
I stuttered. I kind of believed her. I was different. Over the next week, we texted and decided on Terroni for dinner, a mutual Italian favorite.
He was waiting for me out front. We spent five hours in a booth drinking, eating and laughing. When we were in the middle of dessert, fireworks went off from the Christmas tree lighting nearby at the Grove. Everyone ran outside. He sat next to me when we came back in for the first kiss. We closed the place down. We didn’t want the night to end.
He made me an engagement ring out of a plastic swizzle stick a few nights later at a sushi bar. We didn’t feel like we were moving too fast. We felt like we couldn’t move fast enough.
With that, I had to move my divorce from stalled to finalized. Quick.
Both of our marriages had come to screeching halts very unexpectedly. He had years of healing under his belt. I was still in the thick of it. I was stuck in quicksand, and he helped pull me out. His patience was steady as I cut cords and untangled myself.
We had planned to get married at a rooftop L.A. restaurant, with skyline views past the smog, to symbolize how we met and fell in love. Exactly two weeks beforehand, however, my mother was rushed to the ER with critical embolisms. We flew a red-eye back East with my brother and his wife.
Miraculously, my mom recovered but couldn’t fly. We canceled the wedding. She was adamant that we still get married on the day we planned: July 8. It was July 7.
Because my brother was going to marry us anyway, we thought: Why not get married on the plane? Flying back to L.A. from New Jersey, the same way we met but in reverse?
And we did. Flying over Tulsa, Okla.
United Airlines published an in-flight magazine story about our on-the-fly midair ceremony with the headline, “On This Flight, I Thee Wed.” Ring-size steel hose clamps from the hardware store served as stand-in wedding bands. A flight attendant crafted a bouquet out of tissues.
“Do you believe in life after love?” I do now, Cher. I finally snapped out of it.
The author is a creative writer and producer who is directing the music-based documentary “Play That, Teo.” She’s a recovering stand-up comic, proudly from New Jersey and now residing in Los Angeles. She’s on Instagram: @olanadigirolamo
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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