I feel so Cupid

If you take your date out for dinner on Valentine's Day this year, remember, it's a Friday night, so the restaurants will be packed!

And being the classy person you are, you won't be in a place where the term "Super Size It" is even in play.  If you try to get off cheap, you will find yourself playing a role in a new production of "The St Valentine's Day Massacre."

No, you'll be at O'Hoolahan's, or The Holy Roman Empire, or Veganville, waiting for a table in a serpentine line.

But don't worry! You can impress your date, not to mention the couple behind you, praying desperately to see their pager light up like a police car real soon.
Impress your date, I say, by telling the real story of Valentine's Day, celebrated every year on Feb 14.

We send love, and candy and flowers and granola and I don't know what-all else on that day, because long ago, there lived a priest named Valentine.

He was a priest in the Rome diocese in the third century A.D.

Written in 1477, this is the earliest instance of a Valentine love note in English.

It is also the last known Valentine not to feature Snoopy, or chubby cherubs, or pictures of love messages printed on little candy hearts.

Claudius II was the emperor at the time. Known for wearing a red baseball hat with the slogan "Make Rome Great Again," he upset a great many people, mainly because baseball had yet to be invented.

And Claudius thought that married men made for bad soldiers.

(Insert your own joke here.)

Valentine the priest thought this was unfair, not only to the men and women who wanted to get married, but also to his brother Anthony, owner and operator of Rome's largest chain of banquet halls and wedding reception venues.

So Valentine arranged and performed weddings in secret, with a spread that included an open bar, fix-your-own-ice-cream-sundae table, and the Chicken Dance.

One can only get away with such defiance for so long. Claudius found out what Valentine was up to, and threw Val in the cooler, sentenced to death.

This is really starting to sound like a Lifetime movie, but in jail, Valentine fell for the jailer's daughter.

And as he was hauled off to be executed on February 14, he sent that lucky lass a love note signed "from your Valentine."

What's sad is, if the jailers had only realized that it was Valentine's Day, they never would have iced him on the 14th.

So don't YOU forget it either!