A woman who once worked at Crazy Horse — the legendary San Francisco strip club — is searching the internet for a man she met years ago while working under the name Cherelle. He was half Japanese, lived in Washington, owned a business, and stayed at a hotel down the street. He asked her out. She said no. He came back the next day. She said yes. They had dinner. They talked on the phone for weeks. She thought she could spend her life with him.

Then she found out she was pregnant by her ex-boyfriend, felt ashamed, and ghosted him. He kept calling her mother's house. She never picked up.

Now, years later, she wants to reconnect — not to disrupt his life, she says, but to apologize and say hello.

It's a genuinely moving story. It's also, as one SF resident bluntly put it, the kind of thing that "probably deserves a therapy session" — particularly since she can't remember the man's name. Another local was equally direct: "He was that important to you and you can't remember his name?"

Fair points, both. But memory is weird. Feelings stick around longer than facts. And shame has a way of making you bury everything associated with a moment you'd rather forget — including the name of someone who was kind to you when kindness wasn't what you expected.

We're not a missed connections board. We don't think the government should be funding reunification services for former strip club patrons (though honestly, it would be a better use of money than half of what SFMTA spends). But there's something worth noting here about the weight people carry when they make fear-based decisions — when they assume they're not worth someone's time, so they don't even let the other person decide.

Cherelle, if you're reading this: post in a Washington or Seattle forum. Try old phone records from your mom's landline if they exist. And maybe, yeah, talk to someone about it either way. Closure doesn't always require finding the other person. Sometimes it just requires forgiving yourself.

And to the half-Japanese gentleman from Washington who once took a dancer named Cherelle to dinner and then called her mother's house for weeks — wherever you are, you left an impression that outlasted your own name. That's not nothing.