Embarrassment is Relative

Mary C. had it right in the previous posting: I didn't have any embarrassing relatives. So I decided to pick one event where a few relatives got to be temporarily embarrassing. That would be my sister's wedding.

My older sister had one of those huge wedding receptions, where my dad invited everyone he worked with and apparently, everyone he knew. You know the sort of wedding where you only recognize approximately 40% of the people coming at you in the reception line? That kind of wedding.

During the course of the evening, which involved a lot of celebrating, my best friend, also a member of my sister's bridal party, came up to me and confided in a horrified whisper that a dreadful old man kept inviting her to sit on his lap. My friend was drop-dead gorgeous, 19 years old, and somewhere between appalled and terrified. I asked her to point out the old man, and of course it was my Uncle Vernon after a little too much champagne. Then there was the groomsman who followed some of us into the lady's room to let us know we were needed for pictures. We stopped him before he started banging on the stall doors. Uh, a little privacy here? And my older brother was seen to be hanging by his fingertips from some construction scaffolding outside the hotel later that night. Sigh. Big get-togethers with all the relatives. What would life be without them?

So why is Paris Hilton at the top of this post, you might be asking? Well, it comes down to this. My family can get a little nuts during happy occasions but, I'd still rather be related to all of them than related to --

How My Piano Teacher Improved Her Life

My embarrassing moment actually lasted nearly a year. It wasn't the sort of thing that caused heavy, temporary blushing. No, this was the sort of thing that caused long-term, avoid my mother at all cost and if caught try to change the subject kind of embarrassment. In a sentence, my piano teacher quit on me.

My parents wanted all their kids to have a musical background. My oldest brother, poor thing, got saddled with an accordion. The brother after him got an organ, with foot pedals, toggles, a split keyboard, and a very temperamental music instructor. My older sister got piano lessons. And shortly after I started first grade, so did I.

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE music. I write to it, drive to it, clean the house to it, you name it. The problem with learning any musical instrument is that it requires practice and there were so many other more interesting things to do: reading, writing, bicycling, reading, skating, reading, and reading. By the time I was in fifth grade, my piano teacher discovered, to her horror, that I had never learned to read music. I was just memorizing what she showed me and playing it back to her. When the music got a bit more complicated, well, oops. Busted.

The woman must have had the patience of several saints. She persevered with this incredibly lackluster student through what must have been literally years of sheer torture. By high school, I could play reasonably well (for a fourth year student), but there were still so many other more interesting things than practicing: reading, boys, writing, boys, martial arts, boys, writing, boys, reading, and boys. Did I mention boys? At any event, by twelfth grade, and the woman deserves some kind of medal, I sat down for my usual half hour lesson, muddled through what she asked, and then said "See you next week."

She took off her glasses, smiled at me and said, "No, I think this is it." Bless her heart, she never said "I am so out of here." No, she said very politely, "I think we've taken this as far as we can go." Leaving me the fun job of explaining to my mother why she no longer needed to budget for piano lessons.

No one else in the family had their teacher quit on them. No one I've ever TALKED to had their piano teacher quit on them, so I guess that's kind of a unique attribute I have. Although earning that attribute meant ducking my mother for quite some time.

Moral: DON'T PICK THE TULIPS!

This may not be my most embarrassing moment. Those I choose to keep to myself...thank you very much!

This is, however the FIRST embarrassing moment I remember. I was only about six years old, but I remember it like it was yesterday.

Before turning into a brooding, smart-alec teenager and well before Mom turned into the mean, "know-nothing" MOTHER of a brooding, smart-alec teenager, I wanted to please her with something special.

The most special thing I found that spring day was in our neighbor's tulip bed. Gorgeous blooms! Vibrant reds, warm yellows, vivid violets. They captivated my young eyes.

What better gift to show my mom how much I loved her! I'm not sure I picked every single flower, but I came close.

Now, to the embarrassing part. Instead of the anticipated smile of appreciation, all I remember is the look of horror on my mother's face right before she grabbed my hand and marched me up the street to apologize.

Poor Mrs. Boaz was so nice, and tried to tell Mom that it was okay. "No harm done." But even a six-year-old could see the pain on her face having lost an entire bed of beauty she'd nurtured for years.

I never pass a bed of tulips that I don't think of that day.

(Admit it. Wasn't that story better than the one about blowing milk out my nose in the lunch room...all over my new 7th grade "love," Roger?)

Mary Cunningham

Cynthia's Attic Series

Quake

A Serendipitous Tumble

Embarrassing moments. Wow, I have quite a few to choose from. I think I’ve blocked most of them out, but a few still manage to stick with me, like accidentally exposing myself in the middle of a skating rink full of kids, nearly breaking a bowling lane single-handedly, forgetting myself in the middle of a movie theater and shrieking at the screen—yeah, I’ve got a few.

The one that sticks with me most, though, is one that fortunately has a happy ending. It was the beginning of a new semester at college, and my first week with a new boyfriend. Now, you know how it is with a new guy; you’re very careful with what you say and do. You don’t burp, you excuse yourself to the bathroom just to blow your nose, you eat slowly and carefully when you’re with him (and it doesn’t matter if you’re in a fancy restaurant or Taco Bell—you’ve got that stupid paper napkin in your lap), and you’re generally still working very hard to convince him how effortlessly cool you are.

On this particular day, I was meeting him in the outdoor quad between classes. This was the semester I’d decided to be a Biology major (the only semester, mind) and since each of the classes I was taking also had a lab, which had its own textbook, I was carrying about thirty pounds of books in my backpack. Bad decision number one.

Bad decision number two: allowing myself to get all googly-eyed. People in love don’t often watch where their feet are going. If anyone ever did an emergency room survey, I think you’d find a remarkable parallel between people newly in love and people who’ve just broken a bone in an accidental fall.

So, we meet up. We talk, we giggle. I look regretfully at my watch. I give him one last, lingering kiss goodbye, turn to go—

And step in a hole. Ordinarily, I just would have stumbled, but with thirty unaccustomed pounds of glossily-printed knowledge propelling me forward, I toppled like a felled tree onto my face. In front of a crowd of about twenty people. And, most importantly, in front of my new, super-hot boyfriend.

Did I mention this was at the end of a very hot, dry summer? In a high traffic area? The ground was dry. So dry that my body’s impact sent up a veritable mushroom-cloud of dust.

Thanks to a few years of karate training, I bounced back up so quickly that half the crowd wasn’t even sure what had happened. No such luck with the boyfriend, who was doubled up with hysterical laughter, but still tried to beat the dust off my front while I stood giggling nervously, wishing the hole had been a LOT deeper. MILES deeper.

I went off to class, still covered in dirt, and he couldn’t look at me for the rest of the day without busting out laughing. But just a few short weeks later, he asked me to marry him, and in two months, we’ll be celebrating our seventh wedding anniversary.

And you know what? I’m pretty sure that fall was the moment he fell in love with me.

Jacquelyn Sylvan is the author of Surviving Serendipity. Buy at Amazon by clicking the link, or click here to order from Quake Direct!

Prompt

Funny that my turn to blog comes on a day where the subject is being 'prompt'... because the worse moments of my day is when I'm on my way somewhere and there's really bad traffic and I'm getting cranky ...

What?

Prom?

Not prompt?

Oh, well, ... um... lessee ... blog about the Prom, huh?

Okay, here's my entire knowledge of prom, in just one sentence:

" ....... "

Did you get that? No? Okay, I'll type it again.

Here goes: "........"

That's right. I got nothing (double negative, I know).

Anyway, I'm sure the other Teen Seen authors have all kinds of fun memories of the stress and/or excitement of finding a prom date or avoiding same, picking out a tux or dress (aka dressing up all goofy), arranging impressive transportation to the event, planning hair, nails, suntans, picking a king and queen, partying afterwards ... throwing up after afterwards .. and all that.

Not me. I never went to prom. I never wanted to go to prom. I got the heebie jeebies just thinking about it, for two really, really good reasons.

First of all, I was very shy. I mean painfully shy. My face went from normal to scarlet red in a blink. My face made traffic lights jealous. The capillaries feeding my blush reflex were as finely toned as Madonna's abs.

The second is my ineptness, no, more like my dangerousness on a dance floor - ask my wife and kids about this source of occasional jocularity. The movement of my limbs and the music are as much in sync as a hippo ice skating. Except the hippo would be far more graceful. I went to only one dance in high school - the Sadie Hawkins one - and legend has it I caused three twisted knees, two sprained ankles and one embarrassing hip check into the punch bowl.

So maybe the point to this post is that the subject of prom isn't positive for all high school kids. Some (of us) dreaded it, seeing it either as another memory of social failure, lack of financial wherewithal or proof that some of us can't party like a lemur (if you saw Madagascar).

So Prom? ... I got nothing. But prompt? Yeah, that I can handle.

Norm

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