Saving a stranger: Karri Cormican, 25, and her coworker Hannah Bridgeman, 32, thwarted a potential date rape in progress.(REAL-LIFE READS: THE Cosmo Post)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Noe's Bar in San Francisco reminds waitress Karri Cormican of the pub on the TV show Cheers: There are lots of regulars, and it's always pleasant. So she never expected it to be the staging ground for a possible rape.

But one night in May 2005, Karri noticed a man pouring what looked like powder into his date's beer. When he saw Karri looking at him, he quickly grabbed the lemon from the edge of the Hefeweizen glass and squeezed it into the drink to mask what he was actually doing. "It was so bizarre--he didn't even seem to look around before doing it," she recalls.

Karri knew the man's date was in the bathroom and would return any second. The attractive couple had been sharing positive body language all night, so Karri found herself questioning what she had seen.

But she knew the stakes were too high not to act. So when the man's date returned, she told her that the keg the beer had come from was bad and offered to replace her drink. When Karri took the original behind the bar, she looked at it with coworkers; there was white residue at the ...