What comically embarrassing moment can you share?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

In my senior year in high school, I took a class called Shakespeare for performance. It was a joint class by the English and drama departments, and ended with a truncated version of A Midsummers Night’s Dream, which we performed at a school assembly. If I recall, it consisted of four scenes: the opening scene, one of the forest/fairy/lovers scenes, the mechanicals’ rehearsal, and the Pyramus and Thisbe scene.

I was Theseus. The girl playing Hippolyta had to change her costume between the first and last scene; she wore a ragged dress as if I had just captured her from the Amazons in the first scene; for the last scene (which was supposed to be our wedding) she wore a toga. She didn’t have much time to make the change, so I, not having a costume change, helped her.

We had it all planned out. After the opening scene we rushed back to the green room, she stripped down to her skivvies, then we wrapped the toga around her, ready to go do the last scene. The part we didn’t plan was actually figuring out how to tie on a toga. After struggling with the thing for about ten minutes, we realized that we had about two minutes to go, so we jury rigged something up, tied a knot somewhere, and rushed out on stage.

At which point her toga promptly fell off.

On the scale of entertainment, I would say that for most middle-high schoolers, Shakespeare ranks relatively low. On the other hand, a reasonable attractive young lady performing an inadvertent strip tease on stage probably more than made up for it.

22

Somehow, this just warms the cockles of my heart. wipes away a tear

23

I’m sure I’ve posted this before, but what the hell. When I was in college, some people at my coop invited me to go see a friend do some stand-up comedy followed by a jazz band. Well the comedy part went rather well. But as the band played, I began to feel more and more ripped off. They were terrible! I leaned forward and whispered indignantly to my acquaintances “It sounds like they’re just making it up as they go along!!”
When they were done laughing at me, they explained to me: that’s what jazz is. Oh. Oops. My bad.
Then there was Saturday night. We’re watching the Sopranos. Tony killed a guy, so they cut his hands and head off to bury separately from the body. I am confused:

Me: They forgot his feet!
Friends: :confused:
Me: What;s the point of cutting off his hands if they don’t cut his feet off too?
Friend: I could see your point…if they had his toe prints on file, but, WTF?
Me: Can’t they just take the prints off his toes to identify him?
Friends: Wha…?
Me: (suddenly realizing what an idiot I am) NEVER MIND!
Friends: :stuck_out_tongue: :stuck_out_tongue: :stuck_out_tongue:
Me: :eek:

24

Continuing in the school play vein: My class put on a version of Macbeth and I was Macduff. When we rehearsed the last fight scene, the guy playing Macbeth always made this hilarious face right as he died and of course I was the only one that could see it and I kept cracking up.

So, on the night of the play, we’re doing the scene and I’m concentrating hard on not laughing when Macbeth dies. After he fell, I was supposed to run off the stage. Well, I was so focused on not laughing that I didn’t notice that the costume’s long cape had gotten tangled around my one of my legs. I ran! and promptly fell on my face. It got a lot of laughs.

25

About three years ago, my best friend was getting married and she asked me to be a bridesmaid. It was the first (and most likely last) time I’d ever been asked to be a member of a wedding party. It was a pretty small, informal, afternoon backyard wedding with a Hawaiian theme. It was one of those weddings where everybody started drinking before the ceremony, which was blessedly brief. Did I mention it was small? The cooler of beer was stashed in the DJ booth, which was set up right next to the altar area. So as the minister says “You may now kiss the bride,” someone slid a Budweiser into my hand. That’s right, I had a Bud Light in hand in all of the wedding photos. Anyway, there was a pool in the backyard, and all the guests had been encouraged to bring suits and swim. My date was a co-worker who was driving me crazy - she claimed she was straight but was flirty as hell and I couldn’t read the signals at all. So about 9 o’clock that night (after a good six or seven hours of drinking) I convinced her to hop in the pool with me and we proceeded to frolic. More Esther Williams than Girls Gone Wild, but still I felt I was making progress. After an hour or so, I was feeling pretty pruney so I hopped out of the pool to go to the bathroom. I wandered over to the deck, where most of the bridal party was hanging out and shooting the shit, figuring that I’d drip dry for a few minutes before heading into the house to pee. I stood around talking to the bridal party and assorted other guests for a good fifteen minutes before someone was kind enough to tell me that one side of my bikini top had twisted around and one of my breasts had popped out to say hello to all and sundry. Co-worker promptly stuck her head out over the side of the pool and shouted out a rhyming nickname that refers to my exhibitionist tendencies that I am still known by to this day. At least there weren’t any wedding pictures of that. :o

And she was straight after all, the goddamn tease.

26

Some of my friends tend to be…shall we say…a little gross. Naturally, I join in on the fun.

I was helping one of them conduct inventory in his auto parts store. About halfway through, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye and thought it was him. I raised up and ripped a fart that would stop hearts.

It was his girlfriend. :eek:

27

This thread is hilarious!

Okay. College choir rehearsal; there’s maybe forty of us altogether, plus our director (who was a great guy and I miss him, I should email him sometime) and accompanist. We’re doing warmups, which always begin with breathing exercises.

So there I am, on the front row among the other sopranos, and we’re told to take a deep breath. It’s totally quiet, nobody’s making a sound. I open my mouth to inhale and…

BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUURP!

Cue forty people laughing their asses off at me.

I never drank soda within a half hour of choir again!

28

1988, South Korea, I had just graduated from DINFOS and started as the radio news guy on air at the AFKN headquarters in Seoul. My first on air job in the Air Force. I ended my first newscast with a little story I had ripped off the AP wire.

Seems a man had sat down on a toilet after his wife had emptied an entire can of roach killer into it in an attemp to kill a very pesky roach. He finished his post defecation cigarette, he dropped it in the pot, igniting the roach spray.

When the paramedics arrived, he explained how he got the burns in that delicate of an area, and they started laughing so hard they dropped him down a flight of stairs.

By the time I got to the end of the story, I was in tears, unable to inhale, and laughing uncontrollably.

I laughed through two other news breaks that hour. Anytime I made eye contact with the DJ, it would start all over again.

Later that morning an alert bell started ringing on the AP wire machine, stating the news service could not confirm the veracity of the story, and warning everyone not to read it.

I had never heard the term Urban Legend, but that started a quest for truth that ended ultimately with me finding the Straight Dope.

The very next week, I mispronounced Dominican as dom-ah-Knee-can on the air. Ed Bradley was touring the station and heard me. I still cringe crimson at the introduction I had with him later that morning.

29

The Scottish group I belong to fields a member on the Kansas City Mayor’s Ethnic Commission. The Commission puts on two big events every year: the Ethnic Festival (outdoors, in a park, where each member country has a booth) and the Diplomatic Ball, which is what it sounds like - diplomats, attaches, etc., are invited to dinner and dancing. A different country hosts it every year with their traditional entertainment and food.

Our member has been on the commission forever, at least 10 years. That means she gets her pick of tables, so we’re always right up front, near the dais where the mayor and other big-wigs sit.

The first year I went, I organized a formal-ish outfit around one of my tartans: a light gray angora sweater and a darker gray “ball skirt” (big, long, and poofy, although not hoopskirt territory) with my black, gray, and red tartan sash.

Unbeknownst to me, during dinner my skirt got tangled around a chair leg, so when I started to get up, my chair went over backwards and took me with it. Right in front of the Mayor and big-wigs.

30

After our wedding reception, my new in-laws took us out to eat at a local restaurant. I was still wearing my wedding dress which was not a full-length gown, but still obviously a wedding dress. The whole time we were there, we could hear people whispering about how cute we were, and how sweet I looked in my dress. Then as we were leaving, I stood up and bonked my head on the hanging light fixture above the table, and it started swinging, and every body else at the table was either ducking out of the way or trying to stop it. There were a few snickers from the other tables, and I was trying hard not to bust out laughing because my poor incredibly shy hubby looked like he wanted crawl under the table. But I couldn’t hold it back, and clasped my hand over my mouth. So my laughter busted out of my nose instead, in the form of a very loud snort and flying snot.

31

Not much to add, except that I once coughed a wad of snot right into the middle of the table while trying to ask a girl out to the prom.

Needless to say, I had to find another date.

32

This sounds uncannily like something that happened to me during my radio days.

I was working at a small station which was going through an acute labor shortage caused by two of the announcers getting injured in a motorcycle crash. Near the end of my shift (which at that time went from 5 a.m. to 6 p.m. with a brief break in the middle) I was running the board while an equally overworked newswoman read the 5 o’clock report. During this I accidentally dropped a pencil (hilarious, right?). This for some reason started the newswoman giggling, which got me laughing, which sent her into near-hysterics…and so on. This would not have been so bad had it not been for the fact that the story she was reading at the time was about the gruesome death of a local resident. And his relatives were listening to the broadcast. :eek:

If it makes you feel any better, it once took me three tries on-air to pronounce “Namibia”. “Nabib…Nabib…NAMIBIA!”.

The award-winner in this category though was a guy doing the late night news on a competing station, who ran afoul of the word “indigent”. He made four failed attempts to pronounce it correctly (going through “in-din-gent” and “in-dig-nant”, as I recall) before finally just giving up and moving on. :smiley:

33

Well, at least they’re both in the Caribbean.

34

Reposteth and stateth jackmannii, "*Quote:
The very next week, I mispronounced Dominican as dom-ah-Knee-can on the air. Ed Bradley was touring the station and heard me. I still cringe crimson at the introduction I had with him later that morning.

If it makes you feel any better, it once took me three tries on-air to pronounce “Namibia”. “Nabib…Nabib…NAMIBIA!”*."

Ah, we DINFOS Trained Killers are alot alike.

At the same duty station I mentioned above, I too did an occaisional Saturday radio show, though my primary duty was in TV. Now remember in those days, we didn’t receive many satellite feeds so the majority of info we received was in a written format.

I was doing a “new tunes” show (from a new batch of CDs we’d received from AFRTS), highlighting bands just breaking into the Billboard Top 100 and there was a super song I played which several people called in and asked me to re-play. I don’t remember the song name, but I’d pronounced the band’s name over the air as the “Inks.”

My morning DJ called me early Monday, because he’d had a request for the song and the listener couldn’t remember the name of the band. I told him what disc the song was on and that the band’s name was “Inks”, but it was written in all capital letters.

So, for three weeks my morning DJ is spinning this tune, plus a few others by the same band. We have folks calling requesting one tune or another by the “Inks.” And we feel we’re doing a really good job.

Until a kid, fresh from the states checks in.

“You’re a moron, boss,” he greets me. "That’s “INXS” not the “Inks.”

Mortification ensued…

35

I’ll have to ask my daughter to explain INXS vs. the Inks.

However, I think I could do a passable pronunciation of AFRTS on my own but you’d say it stunk.

36

“INXS” is pronounced “in excess”.

37

Hooted BarnOwl, “I’ll have to ask my daughter to explain INXS vs. the Inks.”

Lemme help…

INXS is not pronounced “Inks.”
INXS is pronounced “In Excess.”

Your “Hip Quotient Meter” is pegging in the red…

p.s. – Yes, AFRTS is said aloud as “Ay Farts.”

38

Right after Judy (my highschool sweetheart and wife of 17 years) decided she “preferred the company of other women” and moved out demanding a divorce, my very good friend Terry called on the telephone and invited me to dinner with her and her husband Bob.

She said that she would invite Judy for dinner also.

I went OFF! No profanity as Bob and Terry were and still are dear friends, I still made it clear how this would NEVER happen and what was she trying to DO, and are you out of your MIND, you must be CRAZY and every other negative thing you could think of. Terry pensively said, “Well, ok then, if that’s how you feel.”

Two weeks (TWO WEEKS!) later… Bob’s sister walks into our church; a kind, caring, beautiful, talented SINGLE woman with a GREAT sense of humor who’s just moved here from California. I’ve only heard great things about Bob’s sister who’s name is… Judy.

How could one man be that stupid and still breath on his own? Yeah, we all think it’s funny now but I still think of this when I need some humility.

39

Last night my roommate and I had a friend over for dinner. We ordered pizza and hung out for a while, and then my roommate went downstairs to smoke, leaving our friend to chill with me for a bit. Not a problem since he and I get along very well so we chatted and finished watching the movie while she smoked a cigarette on the stoop. I was laying on the couch with my feet over the arm and he was sitting on the other side of the couch, both of us comfortable but me sprawling out over 2/3 of the sofa. The movie ends and he gets up to head home so I shift around to sit up and walk him to the door, but as I am shifting the tank top I am wearing bunches under my back and my left breast popped out of my shirt. He didn’t mention it and just went on his way but when I told my roommate what happened she laughed so hard she almost fell over and left me a message this morning to be careful to keep my boobs covered up.

40

Pics?