Elvis Costello, matchmaker

Actress Mayim Bialik on the bespectacled songwriter’s improbable romantic influence on her future, in the first of The Times of Israel’s stories for Tu B’Av, the Jewish holiday of love

See more Times of Israel on Google - add us as a Preferred Source

I met my husband in calculus class at UCLA. He was holding a TI-82 graphing calculator, I was holding a TI-81. I should have just walked away; a mixed marriage could never work.

But I couldn’t walk away.

Mayim Bialik loves Elvis Costello. And her husband. (Mayim Bialik image via Shutterstock)

Why? Well, for starters, he looked like Elvis Costello, who was my absolute favorite musician at the time: long sideburns, robust body, round glasses, receding rockabilly hair. And he was wearing an Elvis T-shirt from the Brutal Youth concert which I had recently seen.

Not many guys at UCLA knew who Elvis Costello was, much less wore T-shirts with his face on it (my husband was late to class that day and had slept in that shirt and thus didn’t have time to change out of it).

I was dating someone else at the time, but I knew I had to at least ask him if he liked the concert. I caught up with him after class outside of the Math Sciences building and asked if he liked the concert.

His response was powerful: “Huh?”

Once I clarified that I was referring to his T-shirt, he asked if I’m “that girl from TV” (a detail I forgot until he reminded me years later), and he lied and told me my next class was on his way to his next class. We walked and talked and were friends, study partners, and racquetball partners for a year and a half before we decided to start dating.

It’s a good thing he overslept that day.

—

Read more Tu B’Av tales here.

Mayim Hoya Bialik is best known for her lead role in the 1990s NBC sitcom Blossom, and is currently recurring on CBS’s “The Big Bang Theory” as Sheldon’s love interest, Amy Farrah Fowler. Bialik is a contributing editor at Kveller.com, and authored the book “Beyond the Sling” about her family’s experience with parenting by intuition, published in early 2012 by Simon and Schuster.

Have you found your bashert? Please share your story with us at social@timesofisrael.com, and we may feature it in our Times of Israel Tu B’Av Special.