August 26, 2005

Embarrassing Moments (sort of)
Everett

For a moment to be embarrassing, do you actually have to be embarrassed by it? Or is it sufficient that most anyone else would have been terribly embarrassed to have found himself in my place?

Anyway, when I was a junior in high school, I did a group project on MacBeth for my Brit-Lit class. My group decided to make a video which we entitled "The MacBeth Witch Project" (The Blair Witch Project had come out the previous summer.). We went through our first day of filming and realized allwe really had was about five minutes of us being silly and running around in a bunch of trees. So, we decided we'd need more footage. While most of us were waiting for the last member of our group to show up, we decided we needed some sort of transition to show how we got from the encounter with the witches to where we were going to take up the actual play again. The idea upon which we hit was to have MacBeth visit his parents and tell them the wonderful news that he had become king. As our group consisted entirely of guys, we had the problem of finding someone to play MacBeth's mother. Fortunately, I was there to save the day. An apron, a couple of strategically placed softballs, an even more stratergically placed feather duster, and a terrible falsetto English accent completed the transformation. After a brief expositionary dialogue, the scene culminated with an offer for haggis waffles, which was enthusiatically accepted.

The following school year, I was in AP English, and we were reading the play, "The Beach", (I believe). I was assigned the role of the elderly, yet infantile grandmother, whose lines consisted of such profound statements as RARR and GRAAAAHHH. Now, my voice is rather deep, and it gets deeper when I've been yelling. Additionally, I have inherited my father's and grandfather's ability to project quite well. Needless to say, I decided to take full advantage of this, bringing all of my vocal assets (except my falsetto, which may have actually been appropriate to my character) to bear in playing the part, making her the first frail grandmother to have ever been gifted with a rich basso profundo voice.

Then there was the summer of '02. I was living in Ann Arbor in a University Christian Outreach Men's Summer Household. We had just finished celebrating the Lord's Day (a ceremony and meal based on the Jewish Sabbath, and developed by a messianic Jew named Mark Kinzer), and as a post-Lord's Day activity, we decided to go to Putt-Putt (miniature golf). As we walked in, I noticed that they had a karaoke machine. Upon seeing this the idea occurred to me that we ought to make the loser sing karaoke. I voiced this idea, and everyone agreed to it, whereupon it occurred to me that I, in all likelihood, would be the loser.

Well, I lost. Badly. The sheer badness of my play might actually have been more embarrassing than what follows, but I digress. We went over to the karaoke machine, and the guys I'm with decided that mot only do I have to sing, but they were going to pick the song. They select "Oops, I Did It Again" by Britney Spears. What's more, they decide to record it (The tape has since been lost, though not by me.). I launched into the song about two octaves below where Miss Spears was singing. However, not having a feel for the tempo of the song or what to look for on the screen to find my place in the song, I stumbled around for about the first minute or so. Eventually, I hit my stride and was belting out the deepest rendition of "Oops, I Did It Again" ever recorded. It was also probably the worst rendition of "Oops I Did It Again" ever recorded, with the possible exception of the original. Thus did I do justice to a Britney Spears song. It was that bad. Should I have been embarrassed? Definitely. Was I? Heck no.

What lesson is contained within these stories? It's either that a sense of shame is a good thing or that the best way to deal with an embarrassing situation is to embellish the situation until it passes even the most extreme boundaries of absurdity.*

*This assumes that you're already in the embarrassing situation. You don't actually want to create the embarrassing situation, lest you end up like Howard "The Scream Macine" Dean. YEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAARRRRGGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!