The Seattle Opera House, for the longest time, and maybe even today, for all I know, had a bronze statue of a ballerina in a leaping, leaning, unbalanced pose outside.
One morning a bronze banana peel appeared under her outstretched foot, epoxied onto the base. 
Somehow I think your apology would be muted by your first two sentences.
My iconic moment happened during my 2nd year of college. It was Spring Break and a dozen or so of us decided to go to road trip it down to Ft. Lauderdale. One guy bought a used station wagon, complete with fake-o wood paneling on the side, specifically for the trip. 8 people rode in the Vista Cruiser and 4 of us (me included) rode in the only other car which seemed road worthy, a VW Rabbit. Just our travel arrangements cracks me up now that I think about it, but I digress.
In any event, cut to about 2 hours outside of Ft. Lauderdale. We’d driven through the night and it was about noon. Somehow we’d lost site of the Vista Cruiser and were all on the lookout for it.
We moved into the center lane when we saw a cop had pulled over someone on the right. As we passed, we all realized at exactly the same time that the hapless driver was the MIA Vista Cruiser.
The driver, Steve, said, “I hope they don’t find Alphonso’s weed.”
And on we drove.
While at university I shared an old Victorian rambler of a house with some room mates who were all away for the summer. After an encounter with a bat that literally scared me out of the house, I sought out a nearby chum to return with me and do battle against the demon.
We had our hair covered and had put on long sleeved jackets, I had a tennis racket and he a baseball bat when we crept back into the house. Room to room we crept, on edge, ready for the thing to coming flying at us.
Eventually we had been through all the many rooms and the only place left was the attic bedroom. Being an old house, and actually an attic, there was no wall switch for the light. There was only a pull cord which could only be reached by standing directly in the centre of the room. I tried everything to get my chum to go but he wasn’t having it, it was my residence so my job.
With enormous trepidation I slowly crept up into the attic and reached around desperately for the pull cord, my friend staying cowardly on the stairs. Click ---- burned out bulb!
We tore from the house like it was on fire having seen one too many B horror films. And it’s always the girl that gets killed! We drowned our fear with beer and toasted our brush with certain death!
Getting to shout “Clear!” before defibrillating a patient. He later died, but we got him to the hospital still breathing and beating.
Last spring, I saw a robin pulling a worm out of the ground. I felt like I was in a P.D. Eastman book.
My dog once got me to get out of bed by putting his front paws on the bed beside my head, looking me dead in the eye and saying “Woof.” He did not bark. He did not make a sound like “woof.” He said “Woof.”
How about a cartoon moment?, when I was about 14 I accidentaly ran through a glass window, for a split second I actually left and Ale shaped hole on it… and then I fell on my face over the broken glasses and rolled down the stone steps of the entrance. It didn´t hurt as much as you may think but it left me with half a dozen scars evenly distributed around my anathomy.
Am I the only one here who’s actually had a fly in his soup? “Oh, waiter…”
Not me, but I had half a cockroach on a spanish tortilla. :eek:
My dog does that. It is unexpectedly hilarious.
It was a warm spring day and I wanted to play guitar in the park, but the park was 8 miles away and I didn’t have a car. I foolishly decided that the best solution would be to ride my bike, with guitar, to the park. I put it in a case and slung it over my shoulder and rode off, wobbling down the street. It would swing forward and clank me in the knee every now and then, and I’d have to kind of push it back while holding the bike with one hand.
I had ridden about half the distance when I passed a truck with lawnmowers and lawncare machinery all over it. There were a couple of grizzled latino workers cutting down a tree, and one particularly grizzly one with a straw hat and a big mustache was sitting under a tree. He looked up at me as I passed, and gave me a deliberate, slow, single nod. I nodded back - it was bizarrely cinematic - and continued riding my bike.
Then, suddenly, SNAP! CRASH. I skidded to a stop. I turned around, and my guitar case was lying on the asphalt, battered and chipped. The strap ripped straight out of the case. I looked up and saw the moustache’d dude from before peering out and he looked at me with worry.
I walked over to the guitar, delicately opened the case, took out the guitar. No obvious damage. I look all over it, looking a little closer, and strum it a couple times, sitting on the curb next to my new friend. By now, the workers up in the tree are looking down too.
As I strum it, it sounds fine. I played the beginning to Rodrigo y Gabriela’s Tamacun, and I can see they are really digging it. I don’t speak a word of Spanish, but I felt like I really was talking to them with the guitar in a way.
So I played a lot of songs that day. I didn’t play in the park, I just played on the side of the road with some guys cutting down a tree. I must have been there for 45 minutes. It was fantastic, one of the coolest things that has ever happened to me.
When I finally had to go, I placed the guitar in its case and rested the case on top of the bike. I pushed the bike away, balancing it like this, and as I looked back I saw the same grizzly moustached guy give me the same deliberate nod. I returned the nod and walked off.
When I was 16, I came out to all my relatives over Thanksgiving dinner. That’s probably the biggest cliché I’ve ever been involved in.
(My cousin had just gotten married, and my aunt said, “I think we should take a moment to recognize that this is cousin_mcl and mr_cousin_mcl’s first thanksgiving at the cottage as a married couple!” And everyone said “Awww…” so I jumped in and blurted out, “Well, speaking of long-term relationships, I’m dating a guy called Tom.”
And there was perfect silence.
And then my aunt said, “Okay! Who wants pie?”
So it was a good thing.)
You know in movies when the guy takes a girl’s hand and pulls her to him, they meet in the middle and she fits against him perfectly. Their bodies are entwined like puzzle pieces and their faces are thisclose, ready for kissing…
That happened to me in high school, with my crush, on the last day of school. On our way to the buses, we parted ways and he grabbed my hand and I swung towards him. He was so surprised, had no idea what to do and I’m thinking, “Just kiss me! Please!”
He ended up hugging me. But it is still a moment I remember.
My absolute favourite one!
A few months ago, our younger cat took a seat in one of her favorite spots (under the cocktail table), looked straight at the two of us sitting on the couch, and, with a perfectly serious expression on her face, pronounced: “Arf.”
We had a little talk with her after that.
My cliche moment was losing my last (really!) quarter in a pay phone trying to call my mother and ask her to send money. Welcome to LA…
I met a guy at school a couple of years back at an extra class I was taking. While waiting at the bus stop after class one day we realised that we lived near each other. And so we took the same bus, and got off at the same stop. This was near the preschool I used to attend, and so I told him that, and he replied that he went there too. We also realised that we used to attend swimming classes at the nearby pool, and had the same swimming coach.
He dug up an old class picture he had from preschool, and sure enough there I was, standing next to him.
The only thing that would have made the whole thing an even bigger cliche would have been for us to get together. Fortunately we remain just friends.
My fairytale romance included a castle, a palace guard, a famous ballet dancer and a man who lived just two or three blocks from Hans Christian Andersen’s House.
But it had a surprise ending: Zeldar!
Go figure.
I guess this is sort of a Charlie Chaplin-ish one.
When I was in primary school (what would you call it? Grade school? <13 yrs anyway) I often walked home with a friend. The route was beside a busy road, but at a certain point I had to cross the road at a pedestrian crossing, but we then continued walking along the opposite sides of the same road until I diverged off to go to my house and he to his.
On this particular day we were deep in some sort of enthusiastic conversation as I crossed the road, and then we finished off the conversation yelling across the road to one another. He was looking across at me, yelling something, and I could see he was walking towards a steel pole holding up a sign. You have to realise that the more urgently I yelled, the more intently he looked at me:
Me: “Look out for the pole!”
Him: “What?”
Me: “Look out for the pole!”
Him: “What?”
Me: “LOOK OUT FOR THE…”
CLONK!
He realised what I was saying just in time to turn face first into the pole.
30 years later we’re still friends and still laugh about it.
Hi, nice thread - I enjoy reading all the funny stories!
Zsofia’s ‘Nuns in Habit’ story reminded me of this one: years ago my husband and I were flying from Amsterdam to Dublin. While waiting at the gate we got chatting with a couple of big burly Dutch guys who were going on a fishing trip in Cork. They were in a typically ‘laddish’ mood: talking and laughing loudly and behaving quite macho and brave. That is, until they caught sight of our plane – a tiny old BAC 1-11 which was dwarfed by the Airbuses and 747s next to it. They turned pale and said: “Are we going to fly in that?” My husband explained that Aer Lingus was one of the few western European airlines that still used them and that they were perfectly reliable planes. This failed to reassure them though. But seconds later, some fellow passengers arrived at the gate: six Irish nuns in habit. So I jokingly told the guys not to worry because we had special protection on this flight. I shouldn’t have said that, for the next thing that happened was one of the nuns set off the metal detector alarm and had to be searched.
One day I was wearing green velor pants. My Boss was with her two Yorkies on the top of the six stairs leading up to her office. She stopped to tell me something, and I sat on the stairs. One of the Yorkies came up to me, I started patting him, and he rubbed against my pants. And went nuts. Soon he was rubbing all over one side of my pants, twisting himself like a cat with catnip. The other dog looks at him, goes to the other side, and he starts rubbing against me. I am pinned by these two little dogs rubbing all over my pants like a couple of crackheads, my Boss is taping it on her cell phone and laughing her ass off.