5 COMPLETELY RANDOM AND TOTALLY EMBARRASSING STORIES ABOUT ME

In order to forego the usual resume-type post, or the just-as-usual laundry list of requirements, I here offer to you 5 Completely Random and Totally Embarrassing Stories About Me:

1. While performing Young MC’s “Bust a Move” during a karaoke contest in Boston, I severely sprained my ankle dancing during the musical break. I managed to play it off for the rest of the song (I popped right back up, and it looked like a James Brown-style dance move), but afterwards I had to go to the emergency room to get it looked at. The (male) nurse and the other hospital staff who looked after me kept calling me “John Travolta” the whole night after I related the story to them. So much for “bedside manner.” At least I won the contest.
2. At the Vatican in Rome, my friend J. and I found ourselves wandering through St. Peter’s Basilica, taking in the architecture and the graves of the dead popes. I looked around, and spotting a gaggle of particularly cute Italian co-eds who were on a guided tour, said “Damn!” without thinking about it. My exclamation rose above the hushed reverent whisper and reverberated around the whole place like a divine pronouncement. Immediately aware of my impropriety, I hung my head in shame, but not before J. started moving away from me slowly, expecting a lightning bolt to soar in through a skylight and smite me for blasphemy.
3. During the last election season, I found myself getting a bit annoyed at being accosted multiple times daily by the “Clipboard & Hoodie Brigade”, every time I was on my way to or from work or lunch. Though I sympathized with many of their causes, I was already registered to vote and knew for whom I would cast my ballot (Obama) since before Super Tuesday. So, I started finding ways to avoid them whenever possible. However, one Saturday, about three weeks before Election Day, the Clipboards & Hoodies were unusually thick on the ground as I walked out of the Denver Pavilions, having just seen a matinee movie there. In an effort to skirt their shouts of, “Sir, do you have a minute?”, I crossed over the median of the 16th Street Mall. Paying more attention to where the Hoodies were looking than to where I was going, I ran knee-first into one of the concrete blocks (that masquerade as seats) in the middle of the mall, leaving me with bruised ligaments just below my knee-cap. I paid for my political agnosticism by hobbling around on a bum leg for a full two weeks after that.
4. The first kiss I ever had in my life actually occurred onstage, during a high school performance of the Stephen Sondheim’s fairy-tale based musical, “Into the Woods”. I, as Cinderella’s Prince, was to plant the aforementioned smooch upon The Baker’s Wife (played by a pretty girl named Diana) during the scene in which he seduces her in the woods (people who know the play know the context of this.). However, myself (especially) and Diana were a bit too embarrassed to do the kiss at all during rehearsals, but we reassured our frustrated director that we would indeed “do it on the night”, as they say in theatre-speak. When the time came, during our first performance, which was before the whole school, I steeled myself and went for it. Being someone who has a somewhat ruddy complexion at normal times, I’m sure that the color of my embarrassment bypassed red altogether and went straight to maroon. But I stayed in character and continued on with the scene despite the cannonade of cat-calls and wolf-whistles that assaulted my ears in the moments after the kiss. It must not have been too bad, though, as Diana was afterwards much friendlier to me than she had been inclined to be up until that first show.
5. The first band I played in here in Denver was formed at the bar of the now-gone Cricket on the Hill (R.I.P.). It was Open Mic night, and the gent who ran it, Baggs, approached me an my companions to see if we would be willing to “put something together for the following week, as the band he had scheduled to play that night had cancelled, and he was unable to find a replacement. We agreed, and one week and exactly one rehearsal later, we launched into the greatest travesty of an onstage performance that has ever been visited upon the Denver music scene. The strange thing was that the effect was highly entertaining, if not terribly impressive. We were therefore asked to come back and play again, but with one caveat. We had to change our band name. We had chosen to play as Free Beer, thinking that this would draw a big crowd, which was true to some extent. But the bar was not very happy with this choice of band name, for obvious reasons. Thereafter, the band continued to play out occasionally, with every show being billed as the “farewell reunion show”, and under the much more dignified moniker of The Sally Struthers All-Stars.

If you are 25-35, attractive, and have some stories of your own that can match or better the complete ridiculousness of the above, then please respond to me with a picture, aforementioned stories enclosed.

Then, we can meet up, and reassure ourselves that most of the time, we really pretty cool people after all.