Embarrassing Moments

I heard on the radio that Blender magazine's current issue features a rundown of the top 20 most embarrassing caught-on-tape pop star moments of all time. I am sure you can think of a few: the Milli-Vanilli lip sync debacle, Michael Jackson's Artist of the Millenium "award", and the creme de la creme, the Ashlee Simpson jig on SNL.

I am soooo glad there weren't video cameras around for some of my finer moments.

Blender's article reflects our fascination with each other's embarrassing moments. People ask each other in those ubiquitous "get to know your friends" emails all the time: What is your most embarrassing moment? This is a really hard question for me to answer because there isn't that one, huge moment where I really made an ass out of myself; I have smaller embarrassing moments on an almost daily basis. That's just kinda who I am. I am not, shall we say, graceful by nature, and though I consider myself intelligent, I lack common sense. Put those two together and you've just created the perfect recipe for a walking, talking embarrassing moment.

There are a few worth mentioning, and a blog is for nothing if not for confessions. So, my most embarrassing moments:

1. The time I ripped my taste buds off trying to lick the frost off the inside of a metal freezer. Yeah, yeah, but this was before I watched A Christmas Story and saw what happens when you stick your tongue to a metal flag pole. It was really hot outside, and we were out of popsicles. Here's the dumb thing: when my tongue stuck, I panicked and pulled my tongue off, making an awesome ripping sound I (and I'm sure my mother) can hear even now. I looked in the frost and saw my own taste buds and knew there was trouble. I had to tell everybody what I did. The worst part? When my much-older and wiser sister called the ER to see if I needed to come in, and the nurse there said, "And she's how old?" I was 11.

2. The fence-jumping incident. See, there was this older boy that lived in the house behind me, and my friend and I had a huge crush on him. My backyard and the alley that separated our houses were bordered by an old wooden fence. Well, my friend was wonderfully athletic (you may know her as Rollergirl and frequent commenter "Wanda Y") and could gracefully leap over this fence hurdle-style. One evening as our little crush was hanging out in his backyard playing yard darts with his almost-as-cute friends while we admired his, um, throwing style, "Y" hurdled over the fence so easily I thought, "Well, I run track, too, so I can jump over the fence and really make a good impression." I got both feet caught as I jumped and did a face plant in the grass. It went over well; both "Y" and our crush laughed for a while as I G.I.-Joe-crawled through the grass back to my house, trying not to be seen.

3. When I tipped over in my desk in 9th-grade biology class. I had dropped my pencil, you see, and was sitting in one of those old school desks where the desktop came around your right side. I leaned over, stretching my arm as far as I could; still couldn't reach the pencil. So I raised up a little, put all my weight to the right side of the desk, and leaned down to reach, tipping the desk ever so slightly. Got it! But I had leaned too much, and felt myself starting to go. Somehow, I managed to transfer my weight and tipped over backward instead of sideways, grabbing a classmate's shirt on my way down in a desperate attempt to stop myself. Next thing I know, I'm on my back, still in my desk, with my feet wiggling in the air. I know the sound must have been tremendous as the wood hit that hard floor. I could hear laughter, but couldn't see anyone--just my feet and my desk. The teacher came over to see if I was OK, and when he saw that I was, he turned around and laughed. The only good thing that came of this? I got asked out to the homecoming dance that very same afternoon by a boy who was in that class with me. I guess I got his attention.

4. Getting my hair caught in a product display in the middle of a grocery store. I was in graduate school at the time. It was Christmas, and I really wanted the bag of holiday-wrapped Rolos on the bottom shelf, and as I bent down a little too enthusiastically to get them, my long hair got stuck in a product display and I couldn't get free. My hair actually got wound around a clip used to display something or other. There I was, bent at the waist, rear in the air, wiggling and pulling to get myself free. A couple of bystanders offered to help but I would just as soon have left my scalp hanging there than look anybody in the eye at that point. I got free and immediately checked out, leaving some of my hair behind.

5. Unwittingly mooning many fellow Centre students while walking in costume to a dress rehearsal for our madrigal dinner. We had rented beautiful Renaissance-looking costumes for our big Centre Singers show and dinner that year, and my dress was a gorgeous-but-exceedingly-heavy suede gown with, unbeknownst to me, a broken zipper. The night of dress rehearsal, an eerily warm December night, I had thrown my gown on and raced to the student center, where part of our performance was, to stash away a tambourine. Then I rushed back to the fine arts building for our warm-up. I noticed I got some strange looks, but hey, I was in a Renaissance ball gown. When I arrived back at the dressing rooms to grab the hat for my costume I caught a glimpse of my backside in a full-length mirror. I had come completely unzipped in my travel but because the dress was so heavy, it had stayed up on my shoulders despite how it had gaped open widely from shoulder blades down. It was so freakishly warm outside I hadn't even felt a draft (well, I think I did once, but it was so refreshing through that hot costume I didn't think anything about it and thought it was a gift from the heavens.) The zipper extended all the way to the bottom of my bottom, so thank God I wasn't wearing a thong. But I still gave people an eyeful.

I am sure there are more, but that's a pretty good sampler. Chime in--what's your most embarrassing moment?