The Prom

Throughout my life, I have never been able to do anything with dignity.

Even during many of my life's major milestones, my supposed moments to shine, I have somehow ended up with egg on my face. Take the first and last Annual Extended Family Talent Show, for example. As a six year-old, it seemed like a very big deal, so I rehearsed my act for weeks in advance. When the day of the big show finally came, I stood in the middle of the living room with my aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, and that creepy boyfriend my older cousin had inappropriately invited, waiting for my cue. I was so excited that I was bouncing around like a maniac. That's when, as per usual, things took a turn for the embarrassing. My dad delivered the fatal blow. ce


That ended up being the entirety of my act that year.

Sadly, my dad was actually correct.

I also thought my high school graduation might be a time of potential dignity. Not so. Despite having practiced my speech for weeks, and despite delivering it with great aplomb, I ended up falling flat on may face.

Literally, I ended up falling flat on my face.

So when the senior prom came along, why did I ever think it would be a normal, American, teenage rite-of-passage?

It all started when I picked up my date, Tammy, at her house. Her family waved as we drove off. Of course, her little 8 year-old sister chased after a ball and dashed into the driveway in front of the car.

It was an awkward departure. Next, Tammy and I headed to the pre-party at my friend's house. We had to park down the street and then walk along the sidewalk toward his home, me in my tuxedo and she in her dress.

You know how people tend to gawk at prom kids? Well one woman driving down the street did it for a little too long and failed to see the truck stopped in front of her.

She had been traveling at about 35 mph and so the airbag deployed. There was a lot of smoke. Some bystanders had to drag her unconscious body out of the car.

We turned to walk up the driveway to the party to find that everyone was outside.


Apparently, nothing kills a pre-party like a little face-slamming-into-airbag-at-high-velocity action.

Things picked back up when the cops arrived and let us pose in handcuffs by the squad car. Our pictures ended up looking something like this:

It wasn't your typical pre-prom shoot. Finally, it was time to go. That's when we realized that we were missing something.

We waited and waited. After a while, a limo actually did pass the house. Thinking it was our limo that had simply gotten lost, Tammy took off down the street after it.
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In a cruel twist of fate, that wasn't our limo. My friend John called and learned that they had no record of our reservation...despite the DEPOSIT WE HAD PAID!!!

We ended up calling a cab and cramming our whole group into it like one of those clown cars at the circus. When we arrived at the entrance of the prom, we just tumbled out into the street.

The prom itself was great! Tammy was a huge hit.

After the prom, everyone climbed into their spacious limos to be whisked away to the after-party. My group stuffed itself into another cab. On the plus side, as we rode to the party, Tammy made friends with the driver.

At the after-party, an intoxicated football player became drunk-obsessed with throwing me in the pool, so I basically spent the evening ducking behind pillars and clawing at the at the patio tiles. It was actually a really fun night.

No dignity, but lots of fun. It was pretty standard.

An Investigative Report

Paradox: Nothing could be more nightmarish than ending up on a reality-t.v.-adventure-dating show, whereas nothing could be more heavenly than getting to experience the audition.

But sometimes things have a way of working out.

A friend discovered that NBC would be holding auditions nearby for a reality show and wanted nothing more than to "check out the clientele." That was all I needed to hear. I was in.

A group of us arrived at the bar and found a lot of trendy young people who looked like this:

And this:

Next, we found the NBC folks taking people's information and giving out audition numbers.

That seemed about right.

I decided not to register because I really just wanted to chat with prospective fame junkies. I played dumb and pretended that I had accidentally stumbled upon all this, asking people what it was all about. Most looked embarrassed and mumbled something about a reality show.

"About what!?" I did probe.

The response usually consisted of a lot of ashamed mumbling and staring at the floor. People said things like, "It's like adventure and travel...and dating I guess. It's stupid."

My favorite was a guy we called "Head Shot." He acted like he didn't care and claimed his friend made him try out, but then when we asked what was in his manila folder...

Head shots and an acting resume! Jackpot!

When he came out of the audition he was reticent to say too much because we were potential competition. Those were his words, not mine. Well, he didn't use the word "reticent" but you get the idea. Visual scans of the crowd revealed that NBC wasn't going to have a productive night. No one was model-y enough, especially the old biker guy with the long gray hair and a ZZ Top beard.

He was awesome, but not exactly the island-love-romp type. Maybe more of an "American Choppers" kid of guy.

There was one blond girl with a headband around her whole head and we all agreed she had the best shot. She looked like someone more interested in flirtinis than in multivariate calculus, but that's perfect for these types of things.

Soon it was time for my cadre to enter the group audition. I was standing next my pals when the guy waved us in. I protested that I had not registered and was just there for moral/comedic support, but that didn't seem to matter.

The casting lady inside was so bored with us from the start that she failed to notice I didn't even have a number. About six of us sat down and got to field important questions like "What you do all think about celebrity cheating?" My response didn't exactly win me any points.

Then we were asked about the most romantic thing we'd ever done. Again, my answer was unsatisfactory.

They really seemed to like the girl who said that Eva Longoria was her 11th cousin or something, but when I asked if she had ever met Eva and she said no, the casting professionals became less interested. I actually had to apologize for blowing it for her.

I always kinda wondered how they find these reality stars, and now I know. In high school I helped my dad film an audition video for the first season ever of Survivor where he pretended to eat our pet parrot. He got tapped for an interview but showed up in Miami with a 103 degree fever and to this day he isn't sure what happened in there except a decent amount of sweating.

It was a productive night.

Coupon Caper: A Delicious Debacle

Recently, two of my friends scored an awesome Restaurant.com coupon to a trendy restaurant in town. Being that our friendship is based primarily on cheapness and a common yearning for a good deal, the three of us were in a terrific mood.
spance

All we had to do was spend $35 to get $25 off the bill. We arrived at the restaurant and immediately began calculating how to spend the exact amount of money that would yield the maximum amount of savings.

It was all about the numbers. What we actually wanted didn't matter so much.

Approximately one hour later we were ready to order. Despite having taken our sweet time to decide, we begged the server to let us have the happy hour appetizer price even though it was one minute too late. She pitied us and obliged.

Spirits were sky high, on account of all the savings. We were living the high life, but all that changed when the server returned with some important news. We had misread the coupon and actually needed to spend $50 for the discount. This was dramatic and funny. I decided to be macho and solve the problem.

Normally we would never indulge in restaurant dessert, so we were feeling pretty high class. All of this was mitigated by the fact that the deal wasn't looking quite so good anymore, but the mood was still jovial.

That's when the server returned with more bad news - Happy hour appetisers didn't count toward the $50 total. We handled the news with maturity and grace.

We ordered more cakes. This time, it was of the to-go variety, as we could hardly handle any more food. Once it arrived, we learned that to-go items didn't count toward the $50 minimum. This was too much to handle.

I suggested that they bring the cakes out on a plate, we could each take a bite, and then we'd ask for a doggy bag. That seemed to appeal to their logic and the plan was set in motion.

The cakes and coffees were really starting to pile up, but we had to keep spending in order to save. I think the sever felt bad, because when she came back with our bill, she also brought one heck of a great story.

"You see the man in the blue shirt over there? Well, he's the owner. The other day, he brought his six-year-old son to the restaurant and the kid was being loud and acting up. He poured sugar all over the table and then..."

It was an enchanting evening.

(To read about another adventure involving this trio, visit http://leemar.wordpress.com/2010/12/15/ye-olde-blog-post/. It's about the time we patronized the World's Largest Renaissance Festival (using discounted tickets, of course).)

Mon Pere. Tu Me Manques.

When I was in high school I thought everything was funny. Honestly, I think I just walked around for four years snorting and wheezing at just about any form of novel external stimulus.

A math teacher once dropped the eraser and made a little noise like "urp!" and I laughed so hard I choked on my own saliva and nearly hacked up a lung right there in the front row. And those serious National Honor Society inductions where we all had to act somber and stand in front of a crowd on the risers? Forget it.

I miss those days of life before I became an adult (of sorts).

Anyway, having the propensity to laugh despite situational appropriateness had its down side. Boy did it.

One day in the tenth grade, our French teacher took the class to the theater to see a production about international travel geared toward students learning French. They would do a scene in French and then repeat the scene in English. We all expected it to be trash, but it was actually a high class show. I thought it was pretty funny, how good the show was, so I was already feeling a bit goofy early on.

As fate would have it, I was seated with some friends in the front row on the left side of the stage. We were awfully close, but we were off to the side. Therefore, my stifled laughter wasn't going to be too much of a problem. At least not until they took one of the scenes, the serious graveyard scene, directly to the edge of the right side of the stage. This is where things went afoul.

Out of nowhere, this happy-go-lucky show of traveling young adult tourists took a detour for the dramatic. One of the characters got off the train in Normandy to visit the grave of his dead father. He kneeled in front of the grave, and consequently right in my face, and began speaking/crying to his dad. It basically looked like this:

I was doing ok holding it in until I heard just the slightest inhale-after-a-quiet-laugh from my friend sitting next to me. It was too much for me to handle.

Right there, in front of a theater full of teenagers, I laughed in the face of a man saying goodbye to his deceased father. Of course, this had the dreaded ripple effect, and soon the whole audience was having a good chuckle.

I looked up at the actor through by bleary eyes and felt an overwhelming sense of guilt. Not enough to be able to stop laughing, but guilt nonetheless. I then looked back at my French teacher.

I really did feel terrible. This laughter wasn't out of malice or disrespect. I knew better. I just couldn't do anything about it.

I freaking loved high school.

Important Advice: Don't Follow the Blinking Martini Glass

My college once hired a hypnotist to perform for the student body. I had always been incredibly curious about what it was like to be hypnotised, but I also had reservations about being made a fool in front my peers. That was a job I usually reserved for myself.

Most hypnosis volunteers I had seen in the past ended up like this:

I was especially nervous because I secretly find Cameron Diaz funny and once laughed a little too hard during a screening of "The Holiday." In the end, curiosity won out and I bum rushed the stage when the guy asked for participants. He told us that anyone who wanted to volunteer could come up, but for some reason everyone got needlessly competitive about getting up there.

The hypnotist looked ridiculous...

...but the first thing he did was make fun of my plaid shorts. This was ironic but also probably somewhat fair.

Finally, it was time for him to do his voodoo magic. This is when things went terribly wrong.

He started with small tricks like making us believe that we could not separate our clasped hands. The crowd chuckled as we tried to pry them apart. But then he made us "sleep." When he snapped his fingers, we all slumped over. He began giving us instructions about how we would believe we were driving race cars at top speeds. When he snapped his fingers, everyone on stage was going wild.

Everyone but me, that is. I was somehow rendered completely incapable of speech, movement, cognition, or non-zombie-like behavior.

I just sat there uselessly. Several photos taken from the audience revealed that my pupils were dilated to the size of dinner plates. At first everyone thought it was pretty funny.

But as the show continued and the hypnotist created new, hilarious scenarios, I remained in a drooling, baby-like state. People started getting nervous, not sure if this was normal.

I could hear and see everything that was happening, but I was simply unable to react properly to stimuli. I started to notice that even the hypnotist was looking at me a little worriedly. I would have become upset, but nothing really seemed to matter in my morphine-like condition. Not even the drool that was collecting around my chair.

Finally, when he snapped us all out of it, I kinda came back to. People crowded around telling me they were relieved and asking me what had happened. I really couldn't explain. I think I was still in a bit of a daze, like after one of those naps that lasts too long and stays with you for a while.

A few days later, I overheard someone I didn't know point me out to his friends and say, "That's that kid on drugs." I was disturbed but figured I had misunderstood. Then it happened again. And then a third time. I learned that everyone who didn't know me on campus assumed that I was addicted to heavy narcotics based on the hypnotist show. Apparently being hypnotised wasn't a logical enough explanation.

And that's the unlikely story of how I got street cred.

Little League Chew

When I was seven years old my parents signed me up for little league. I was reluctant to say the least. It was my understanding that you had to wear long pants for baseball. If there was one thing I hated, it was long pants. And there were so many other sports that didn't require long pants! Swimming, for instance, was virtually impossible in long pants. Nonetheless, we were Americans so I found myself in long stretchy pants, spiky shoes, and a mouth full of Big League Chew.

Lacking keen depth perception, I was the perfect choice for second string right fielder.

It was usually pretty quiet in the outfield, being that we were seven an all. My dad would routinely slap his hand over his closed eyes tell me for the last time not to sit down in the grass. I needed to focus. Come to think of it, paying attention during a game was not easy for any of us Pirates.

Our record was pretty bleak. This all came to a head during one particular practice. Coach noticed that all of us were staring off into space while someone was batting, and a warning was in order. He hollered for us to bring it in, so naturally we ambled toward him. Hustling wasn't really our thing.

“I can’t have you all staring into space. Not while someone is batting. You have to pay attention at all times or a stray ball could nail you. Is that clear?”

“Yeeees.”

“Okay. Now hustle back out there.”

I loped back out to right field and immediately resumed staring into space. The next pitch, the very next pitch, a kid on our team did something none of us had ever done before.

Of all the places in the entire universe where that ball could have landed:

It ended up right on my nose. I never saw it coming. I heard a loud crack somewhere deep inside my skull, stumbled back into the grass, and saw my shirt turn from white to red.

I still wasn’t sure what had happened when the whole team crowded around. Everything looked all weird and shimmery.

“Now this is exactly what I was talking about!" barked Coach. Do you all see why you can’t stare off into space?! Do you see?!”

I practically expected him to dip his finger in my blood and write“PAY ATTENTION” on my forehead. I looked up to see my mom tearing onto the field. She swooped me out of the crowd and into the car. I started realizing that this was a pretty good deal. It didn’t really hurt all that badly (on account of the shock), I got to look at a whole lot of my own blood, and most importantly, I got to get out of my long pants early.

That wasn’t the only bloodshed I was involved in that Little League season. A few days before one of our games, sickness spread throughout half the team. Suddenly I became the second baseman. I was terrified. Everyone looked so much bigger closer up.

Soon, a runner was headed toward second base and someone chucked me the ball. God made it so that the ball landed in my mitt and stayed there. I didn’t know exactly what to do, but I remembered learning that you tagged people to get them out once you had the ball. As the runner approached, I took the ball and hit him with it, right in the face.

He went down like a rock and I started jumping up and down. The crowd came running, but I began to notice that they were not crowding around me to congratulate me. They ran toward the other kid who was grunting on the ground. There was blood all over his face. Wasn't this just a part of the game? One of the parents looked at me angrily. “Why did you do that?!” Baseball made NO sense.

And that's how I came to love soccer.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Oodles of Noodles

I have never been the political activist type. In college, I recall that some people I knew drove up to D.C for a rally to end hunger and homelessness. I didn't really know what all that entailed, but I pictured that they got out of the car, joined a mob, and proceeded to yell and shake their fists in the direction of official looking buildings.

I guess I'm just not emotional enough for that kind of thing. I never really understood the whole being passionate concept.

Then one day, I accidentally stumbled into the middle of a controversy of which I still, to this day, am not exactly sure what the message was.

It was spring semester of my freshman year when our art professor told us we needed to do an impactful installation art piece, no drawings or paintings allowed. I sat down with my art partner, a pretty, sophomore girl, and we started brainstorming. Then we presented our top ideas to the professor. I suggested we wrap an entire tree on campus in tin foil. The professor asked what that would express. Well I sure as heck didn't know so I stammered something about industry injecting itself into the inner xylem and phloem of our society or some crap. Plus, it would look cool. He wasn't buying it so we went back to the drawing board. That's when we came up with the best idea.

We would build a giant, to-scale place setting of spaghetti and meatballs! This didn't really symbolize anything either, but it was cool so we picked it.

We snuck into the kitchen of a frat house to cook about 80 pounds of spaghetti. It made me glad that I didn't regularly eat there.

We boiled as many industrial sized pots of water as we could and dumped in the pasta. One thing we hadn't counted on was the fact that the pasta was going to be a lot heavier once it was cooked. It also expanded a whole lot. We dumped it into several trash bags and dragged them up the hill to my dorm room.

Next we baked two humongous blobs of meat to make giant sized meatballs. The outside sure cooked fast, while the inside remained raw. I had envisioned them cooking all the way through, but the smoke alarm in the building prevented that.

This wasn't even my dorm, so everyone was extra mad.

Next, it was time to set up the display at the entrance to the student union.

Finally, it was time to take pictures. We sure looked small next to the place setting.


Up to this point everything seemed harmless, aside from the whole smoke alarm thing. But then, this happened:


I was confused. Was this person upset because we had blocked the entrance? You could still get into the union, really. Then, it happened again. What was this strange reaction?

Turns out, we had set up this display on the same day they were hosting the OXFAM dinner in the union - an internationally sponsored dinner to bring awareness to world hunger. And here we stood, next to one of the most colossal wastes of food any of us had ever seen. It was like some sort of strange opposition to an anti-hunger campaign, and who is against ending hunger, really? It was like we were taking the side of the French aristocracy during the revolution. To make matters worse, I had to stand next to the display all day in order to shoo birds and squirrels away who kept trying to eat it. Not only had I enraged the socially conscious, but I also had to run around like an idiot shaking a branch at the local fauna as they tried to sneak past me.

The good news was that I was suffering for my art! I was a martyr - something passionate people dream about! After being yelled at a third and a fourth time, I was feeling pretty good. I also got smart and began recording people's reactions so that when we presented a summary of our project to the class, we could show our professor the intense reactions we evoked. Artists love that sort of thing. This actually made the passersby even more angry.

When we finally presented the project, it was a huge hit. The professor loved the way we evoked an ironic sense of passion among typically complacent consumers, a concept that we readily went along with as if it were our intention. We ended up getting an A-, which, to be honest, left me a little miffed considering the girl who filmed herself going to the bathroom got an actual A. The professor mentioned something about how she had challenged gender stereotypes while at the same time questioning the taboo norms of our modern culture.

I was bummed we were outdone, but man, it was one epic bowl of pasta. And I was an accidental artist. Let them eat pasta.