What comically embarrassing moment can you share?

I was a church organist at the tender age of 15. I wasn’t all that experienced, but our previous organist broke both a hip and an arm right before Christmas. They asked me to fill in just for the holiday season, but somehow that stretched out to five years. (organists are hard to find)

Not only did the church have trouble finding organists, but cantors were hard to come by, as well. I had one cantor, a sweet old man named Rudy, who was very nearly deaf. He could lead the singing for me as long as I sang along with him as loudly as I could. Mostly I think he read my lips. The rest of the congregation tended not to sing much.

The church did not have air conditioning. In the summertime the doors were left open to generate a cross breeze. The organ was situated a few feet away from one of those open doors.

The song was “One Bread, One Body.” Rudy was singing, I was playing, and I sang along, doing my best to keep him on tempo (he tended to really drag out the slower hymns). All was silent in the church as people filed up to the front for communion. I took a big breath for the next phrase, and inhaled a fly, which lodged in my throat. "One bread, one body, one Lord of all. . . "

I started choking. The fly was struggling in my thoat. I could feel it. I either had to cough up the fly or swallow it the rest of the way. I tried swallowing. Meanwhile, the communion hymn marched on. "And we, though many, throughout the earth. . . " I reverently played on while choking on the fly. Rudy was oblivious. My mother and everyone sitting nearby, however, noticed me turning all sorts of attractive colors as I choked on a fly.

The fly started to go down, but then it struggled its way back up. It was buzzing around my mouth. I spat it on the keyboard. “We are one body in this one Lord!”

I finished the hymn, never missing a beat. There on a G on the lower register was the fly, doing circles in a puddle of saliva.

I still can’t sing that song without laughing internally. My mother threatened to get me one of those church hats with the mesh veil. A few weeks later a squirrel came running in the open door during mass. . .

Love the stories, and I have one question for the ladies: is it really possible that a boob could be hanging out and you don’t realize it?

Completely hanging out? Probably not without a lot to drink first.

Some peekage? Yes, that’s possible to do without notice.

Well, in my defense I noticed when it happened so it isn’t as though I was unaware of the situation. My mortification knew no bounds. If you were in a swimming pool or something I can see it happening without being at all aware of it though.

I was bicycling down the hill towards home when I was around 11 or 12. I rode past a female classmate who lived on my street, and in the boneheaded tradition of boys who need to show off in front of girls, I picked up speed to make a swooping turn into my driveway.

The driveway is at the outside of a curve at the bottom of a hill and usually had a triangle in the middle of it where dirt and gravel would be blown by passing cars, and shaped by cars going out of the driveway in either direction. So, going too fast I hit that patch and bam! down I went, bouncing a bit down the driveway and coming to a halt with my foot trapped in the rear triangle and wheel somehow. More embarrassed than hurt (boy, I wish I had resilient bones like that now!), I started dragging myself on my elbows down the driveway, the bike still wrapped around my foot, hoping to get out of sight around the bend ten yards away.

My crash had been witnessed by a motorist who stopped and asked me if I needed help. “No,” I said [drag-scrape], “I’m” [drag-scrape] “fine.” [drag-scrape] “Really.” At this point my classmate came into view and looked over curiously. I thanked the motorist, managed to disengage my foot, and scrambled away in acute embarrassment, disappointed in myself for succumbing to the showoff urge.

Well, before it happened to me I would have said no, absolutely not. I have not worn a bikini since that night.

Seven years ago I was jumping through the hoops to get my pilots license. Part of the requirements are going into the air with and instructor to do maneuvers and simulate various dangerous situations. After hours and hours of this you get use to doing exactly what you’re told, no more no less. One of the maneuvers had you wear a visor (much like Luke Skywalker’s blast shield) so you flew by instruments alone. You then closed your eyes while the instructor put the plane at an unusual pitch and the idea was for you to use your instruments to right the plane again. This seemed at the time to be just too incredibly easy and added to the fact that the instructor never told me to open my eyes. For 5 lessons or so I tried to level the plane with my eyes shut until the instructor discovered what was wrong.

Don’t feel too bad. I have a couple of Ballet DVDs - standard stuff, not porn - in which Prima Ballerinas show, inadvertently or not, their pubic hair out of the sides of their panties. Briefly flashing a tit is cute; flashing hair isn’t.

Okay, so you swallowed that … then what happened??

OK, I’ve told this before somewhere and it happened 30+ years ago, both my parents are gone, and this still makes me squirm when I think of it.

I was in high school, maybe a sophomore, and loved chemistry because you could make such cool pyrotechnics. While scrounging through the chemistry supplies one day I came across a rusty and disintegrating can of metallic sodium with a prominent warning label saying “Caution! Reacts violently with water!” “Great!” I thought, “Just what I need.” and took the can home with me. My parents took a dim view of my incendiary play so I stashed the can in the garage and waited for Sunday.
My father was a Baptist preacher, the kind where the women wear little makeup and no one has sex standing up because it might be mistaken for dancing. When you went to church, you wore a black suit, white shirt, and a tie. Sex was something that never happened and my own existence was due to a lucky find under a cabbage leaf. Well, Sunday rolled around and my parents got dressed and left. I stayed home with some excuse.
I puttered around a bit and then got out my can of sodium. I didn’t want to make a big explosion, so I used some pliers and got out a greasy chunk of sodium about the size of a quarter or half dollar and maybe four times as thick. I threw this into the gravel driveway and got around the corner of the garage with a garden hose. Carefully peeking around the corner, I started spraying the sodium which sparked and hissed and crackled as the oil was washed away. Seriously disappointed, I stepped out from the corner saying, “Shit! They call that ‘violent!’” . . . And that was when the thing detonated. Neighbors later told my parents that it sounded like a 12 gauge shotgun.
I was suddenly covered in tiny chunks of sodium that were eating through my clothes as well as my skin. I had to get this stuff off me before it reached something vital! Almost panicking, I ran to the house, shedding clothes as I went. By the time I got through the back door and into the kitchen I was completely naked. I grabbed a bottle of corn oil and dumped it over my head, frantically sluicing the sodium off me and onto the floor.
So there I was, maybe 15 years old, standing in the kitchen stark naked and covered from head to toe in corn oil.

And that’s when my parents walked in. All nicely dressed, just getting back from church, and confronted with this little visual.

I’ve never been sure exactly what my parents thought was going on but am fairly certain they thought I was up to something kinky rather than simply illegal, a much worse crime in their books.

Regards

Testy