I made no speech at my brother’s wedding either. I didn’t know it was routine to work on a routine and entertain people. So I just said, Jeff and Mary, we love you and wish you all the best. Done. Perhaps it was for the best. I have squirmed through a few best man soliloquies since.
A most embarrassing moment came when I was about 13. I was big for my age and still thinking much like a kid. The kids my age and a year or two younger started to play sort of a hide and seek game. This was in the streets of Brooklyn. There was a girl my age who was really pretty and she was wearing black. I saw what I thought was her sticking her head out of a doorway several houses down the block. I ran up and grabbed the door knob and said “I got ya” and this woman screamed from the other side. I was mortified and jumped the whole flight of stairs. She came out and I begged for forgiveness and sid it was an accident. I was embarrassed beyond the beyond. It was clearly time to become a full-fledged teenager and leave childhood behind.
This may not be the worst faux pas I ever made, but it’s the most recent.
A coworker’s mother passed away over our winter holiday (the office was closed for 10 days around Christmas), and an email went out to the staff to let us all know on the day we got back. Later that day, I saw her in the restroom and told her how sorry I was to hear about her mother. So far so good! We talked a bit about her mother, and then…and then…I actually said, “Other than that, did you have a good holiday?”
I have no idea why I said that, especially as my own mother passed away during a holiday break, so besides common courtesy I should have known better from personal experience, too. She just said, “No,” and then we tied off the conversation, but the moment those words left my mouth, I could have kicked myself.
“Besides that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?” Uggghh.
I was my brother’s best man. In lieu of a speech, I recited all the verses to the song Forever Young. It was beautiful. A few people were teary-eyed, including me.
Later, my brother’s new in laws approached me to let me know how quaint they thought it was for me to write a poem, and that poetry was hard work. Their attitude was sort of “don’t quit your day job”
At my cousin’s wedding reception many years ago I was seated at a table closest to the stage. My cousin’s very elderly grandmother thought it would be a good idea to climb up the stairs to talk to my cousin and she fell backwards onto the table, smashing everything. Thankfully at that exact moment my date and I stood up to go somewhere, otherwise she would have landed right on us. Anyway everyone at that table moved to sit at other tables. Later on the wedding party announced that whoever had the closest birthday at a table got to keep the centrepiece. I was all “Hey my birthday is next week!” and took the centrepiece. About 15 years later it dawned on me that I wasn’t meant to be sitting at that table in the first place and had no business taking the centrepiece.
One time when I was about 21 a friend won a radio contest. She got to take a bunch of friends in a limo to a restaurant and then a bar in the city next to ours. We drank at her house, in the limo, at the restaurant, at the bar… I got totally smashed and made a jackass of myself. Not in a bad way, but I look back and cringe at my embarassing drunk-ass behaviour.
When I was 12 a good friend had a party at her house. She lived in a different school district from mine and all the kids at the party went to her school. They were a bunch of assholes and kept making fun of me saying how their volleyball team beat our volleyball team and shit like that. I kept saying I didn’t play sports and didn’t care, but these jerks would not let up. I ended up going upstairs and crying in my friend’s room. The faux-pas part is that when I stopped crying I went back downstairs and sulked in the party for a while, I guess I was looking for sympathy but all I got was more teasing and her mom reamed her out for letting her friends treat me like crap. In retrospect I should have left as soon as the teasing started and stayed upstairs and not ruined her party.
I hope you won’t mind if I offer my opinion about this one.
As far as I can tell, your friend was not much of a friend at all and she can just go straight to The Blazes. Alternatively, she can just go <expletive deleted> herself (providing she is not a member on this board - in which case, I’ll revert to my prior remark about The Blazes).
I can think of much better ways you could have ruined her party that:
she would have deserved
because you were only 12, no one could have ever brought criminal charges against you.
So many times I wish that when I was 12 I would have known that I could have done all kinds of vindictive shit. Oh well, live and learn. Right?
Years ago, Dad was recovering from surgery in the hospital. He had one of those devices where you suck air in and attempt to keep the three plastic balls elevated for as long as you can in order to exercise your lungs.
During the visit I was explaining how it works and encouraging him to use it. As we stepped into a crowded but quiet hallway in order to leave, I shouted back into his room, “bye, Dad; keep your balls up!”
I recognized immediately - but too late - how that sounded.
mmm
Summer job in college - I was sitting with someone in the back of a pickup truck while two others were in the cab. While talking to the guy in the back I gleefully ripped into the physical appearances of the others in the company, including the people sitting up front (a guy and a girl). After a while I got out of the back to ask them something - the other guy in back then said something and I realized our entire conversation for the last half hour could be heard CRYSTAL CLEAR up front. I apologized to them the next day but that was way too little too late.
I was about 16 and had a newish friend spend the night. I’ve always been a bit socially awkward in that my mouth often works before my brain has a chance to stop it. Anyway, my dad was making a breakfast of bacon and eggs and I asked her if she wanted any. She agreed to some eggs but declined the bacon which just about blew my mind. At that point I most definitely knew she wasn’t vegetarian so that couldn’t be it. So, just dumbfounded that anyone would not like bacon, I blurt out the first thing that came to mind in a very shocked and frankly disgusted tone. “You don’t like bacon?? Everyone likes bacon! What are you? Like Jewish or something?” Yup. She was Jewish. Wow. I wanted to just crawl under a rock and die. Kinda didn’t see her again.
Oh nozes not “The Blazes”. How can you possibly send someone to “The Blazes”? How dare you? I can’t believe you could do such a thing. That is just possibly the worst <expletive deleted> <expletive deleted> <expletive deleted> place you can <expletive deleted> <expletive deleted> threaten to <expletive deleted> send someone to. I am just so <expletive deleted> that I can’t possibly even right now. Oh my! I am just so <expletive deleted> that you could even think of such a thing. Oh my! I just can’t even fathom that you would do such a thing. <expletive deleted> hell how could you even think of doing such a horrible <expletive deleted>. I don’t think I will ever be able to get over this. Oh My! <expletive deleted>
A manager at one of the companies I worked at once sent around a routine office memo to everyone in his department (about 50 people or so) and accidentally attached his net worth analysis to it. Not only did it have all the details of every penny he made, but it also had little cutesy names he and his wife called each other along with what they were going to buy (e.g., a fur coat for Honey Bunny).
I turned fifty the same year my son turned 18. There was a skydiving place in Alabama (where life is cheap) that had an accelerated free fall program that let you solo skydive from 13,500 feet on your first day (I already said it was in Alabama, right?). We went for it. It was a great time, minus me hitting a small forest, and when I met someone a few weeks later I was making small talk, you know how you do, and I told him the story.
He told me the story of when his brother was skydiving and came down in Lake Michigan and drowned. I said, “Well, technically, that was a swimming accident”. Which I guess is true, but really a dick thing to say.
The most embarrassing fuck-up I can recall is when I was teaching a class. In the whole class there was like twenty white kids and one Native American girl. At semester time, the Native American girl dropped the course and got replaced by a DIFFERENT Native American girl. She had the same hair, same general appearance, and sat in the exact same chair. I hadn’t even really glanced at her and called her by the first girl’s name.
So it was bad enough that I wasn’t paying attention to who was in my class, but I just basically confirmed the stereotype that white people can’t tell other races apart.
One was at the funeral of one of my good friends. The pastor asked for anyone that wanted to give a remembrance of the deceased to come up and share. Several people did and I decided to share a story which properly told, would have demonstrated the good nature of my friend. I got nervous and left out a part of the story and it ended up a “this one time we were SO drunk” story. Realized once I sat down that I had left out the most significant part of the story.
Sorry, Dave.
Thankfully, the next person up shared some great stuff and totally rocked it.
Oh my god. I was just telling a coworker about a movie I watched and how it’s such a sweet movie “It’s the type of movie you could watch with your mom.”
