Jolene, Jolene

The last time my mom and I went out to eat while I was home, the restaurant's hostess turned out to be a woman who had graduated a year or so ahead of me in high school.  She recognized my face right away, and I thought "It has to be her!" as soon as I saw my her name badge--she's the only Jolene I've ever known--and we caught up as we headed toward a booth.  After I'd paid the bill awhile later, I waited until Jolene had a free moment and told her something I'd been wanting to tell her since the ninth grade.  

For weeks of what was my freshman year, I and however-many other students rehearsed after classes and on weekends for the school musical tryouts, learning song lyrics and dance steps for Bye Bye Birdie.  I'd been singing in chorus for the past few years, but picking up choreography was new to me.  After hours and hours spent practicing in the school gym and cafeteria surrounded by so many other students, though, I felt as ready as I could be when Audition Day rolled around.  Up on stage, the school musical directors grouped the first group of students into maybe four rows before taking their seats in the auditorium.  I was in the back row as we began, and it all felt just like it had in rehearsals:  People dancing to either side of me and in front of me.  After the students in the front row were judged, they would be dismissed, and the next row's dancers would move up for their official audition.  My row was finally front-and-center, and as soon as the music began and I found myself looking at the judges and the high school auditorium seats for the first time, as opposed to the dancing students I was used to, I realized I didn't know the choreography at all:  I had just had been keeping up with everyone around me before.  I stood frozen as students on either side of me continued to dance, and my choir director called out, "Val!  Just find your place and keep going!  It's okay!" I  nodded and apologized and actually laughed, still thinking that surely, the steps would come back to me, but no, they never did.  I really didn't know the number at all and remained frozen in the otherwise-dancing front row throughout it.  I remember wondering if it would be any less embarrassing just to walk off the stage, but I decided to stay up there instead. 

After what seemed like an hour, the song ended, and my next memory is of standing in the girls' restroom cringing from the almost flesh-eating mortification one can likely only feel as a teenager.  Jolene was in there there too and asked me what was wrong, and although I barely even knew her--it was her brother with whom I would graduate; I only knew Jolene from the bus rides to and from school--I spilled out the whole humiliating story, telling her I felt so stupid, just so stupid.  This kind and wise-beyond-her-high-school-years girl snapped, "Val, don't you ever let yourself feel stupid!  You don't have anything to feel stupid about!  You tried to do something, and it didn't work, that's all.  It's okay!  A bunch of people probably wanted to be in the musical and were too scared even to sign up!  At least you tried!"  She was right, of course.  I still blush when I remember it--I was the only student who froze like that, after all--but my appreciation of Jolene's kindness and wisdom has always outweighed that embarrassment.  And finally, more than twenty years later, I got to tell her how much that has meant to me all this time.  She thanked me for telling her--and admitted that she didn't remember the story at all--then made me and Mom laugh when she gloated, "It's so funny because I tell my kids all the time that it doesn't matter if you win or lose as long as you do your best--And now I can go home today and tell them someone said I was right!"  Dear Jolene.  :)  

Working on Bye Bye Birdie would provide me with some of my happiest high school memories.  I ended up in the chorus as one of the singing-but-decidedly-not-dancing "townspeople," right where I belonged from the start.  The following school year, I knew from the get-go to sign up as a "villager" and not as a potential dancer for Brigadoon.  Both my choir director and Jolene were right when they said it was okay:  This is just how we learn sometimes.  Jolene's generosity that afternoon is one of the best of all my high school memories, and how sweet that I got to tell her.  ♥

One loses many laughs by not laughing at oneself. ~ Sara Jeannette Duncan

Today is my dear friend Marylou's birthday.  Ahh, Marylou!  She makes me laugh.  ♥  A classic Marylou story circa 1998:  She received one of those silly quiz-type emails from a friend, and one of the questions asked her to share her Most Embarrassing Moment.  She took her time with the goofy survey questions, described some humiliating episode, and emailed it to her friend.  Soon after, a response appeared in her inbox--from a complete stranger.  "I think you meant to send this to someone else," it read.  "I guess you have a new Most Embarrassing Moment."  That made me cackle when she first told me about it, and it still makes me laugh.  Almost every conversation with (and email and letter from) Marylou contains a gem like that.  

In her honor, and as a virtual birthday present, I will remind her of--and share with you--another story from around the same time.  After making my way from my college's library to the science center halfway across campus one afternoon, I arrived at the building's door in the usual crush of students all trying to get to class on time, and as I waited to enter it, I saw the reflection of one of the students beside me in the mob:  She was dressed up in this sweet outfit--a long-sleeved white blouse under a sleeveless gray jumper-dress with white tights--and I simultaneously admired her outfit and noticed  that (poor girl!) her dress was tucked into the front of her tights.  Those realizations and my sudden horror for her--a young woman exposed from the hip down in this horde of students!--and my wondering how to tell her--seemingly all swept through my mind in a single instant, and when we got closer to the door and its reflection, I looked up and saw that--The girl was ME.  (I die again as I write this.)  I had walked halfway across campus during the busy class-change time with my oh-so-cute dress hitched up into my tights--IN THE FRONT!--and no one (no one! not even another woman?!) TOLD me.  I had passed people I KNEW on the way to class.  I had  said hello to students and PROFESSORS.  (I die again and again.)  It has been about fifteen years and I am still both laughing and blushing even as I type this.  I don't remember how or where I adjusted my dress and tights--I assume right in front of everyone and right then, since I obviously couldn't go to class like that--and I remember nothing else from that afternoon except that later on, I told my coworkers at the writing center, and they all died along with me--both from the utter horror of it and from laughter.  

A year or so later, when I was settling into grad school, a card arrived from Marylou wishing me luck on my new campus.  Tucked inside the envelope was a handful of coupons for L'eggswear-brand tights.  Ha ha.  :)  

When the Dress-In-the-Tights saga somehow came up in conversation awhile back, Marylou's only comment was a dry "At least you were wearing underwear."  Indeed!  And never let it be said that I don't thank God for small favors.  :)  But still, truly:  GAH! 

 What can you do but laugh.  :)

Sigh.  :)  

'Happiest of birthdays, Marylou.  :)  ♥

Goofball at the Grocery Store (or Shy Val Strikes Again)

I have a knack for getting myself into the most awkward situations, and the latest is that, in a poorly-thought-out attempt not to embarrass a grocery store employee who obviously had me confused with another shopper last week, I seem to have agreed with his assumption that I have children.  "You dummy!" Mike laughed when I finally, after a week of suffering privately over my socially clumsy interactions with this man, told him what I had (and hadn't) said to this kind and good-intentioned person.  "Why didn't you just correct him?!"  Yes, well, that would have been an easy fix, I see now, more than a week into my repeated almost-daily attempts to try to avoid him.  

This man has worked in the store the entire six years I've shopped there, and we always exchange hellos and make small talk.  He is, as Mike and I have noted numerous times, undoubtedly among the two nicest staff members in the entire supermarket.  Those of you who have worked retail know just how amazing his kind of constant pleasantness with the public is.  I have never been there with children, but for whatever reason, this employee greeted me last week with a cheerful "How are your little ones?" and because I knew ("knew") that he would realize his mistake the second I walked away from him and I didn't want him to feel embarrassed, I simply said, "Oh!  Fine.  Thank you!" and wished him a good day and kind of scampered off.  Strike One.  It threw me off, and I clearly wasn't graceful in my quick getaway, but I thought nothing more of it.  

Until the next time it happened, when he said my "little ones" sure must keep me busy and then asked me if they were in school yet.  You would think that that would have been the moment I'd have corrected him and that we'd have had a good laugh about it and that would be the end of this, but it was not.  Apparently, the words "little ones" set off the Shy Person Panic Alarm in my head, for I felt like I was rooted to that spot of the store aisle and my mind came up with nothing except "Uhh, no."  And I raced toward the checkout lines, leaving this man looking puzzled by my uncharacteristically curt response.  I have been trying to tell myself that surely ("surely"), I must have at least called a more-gracious "Thank you!" or "Have a nice day!" over my shoulder as I ran away, but I don't think I did.  Strike Two.  

And now, more than a week later, because I know the jig is up and I need to correct him--which we all know will now be more mortifying for me than my having corrected his error in the first place would have ever been for him--I have been avoiding this man altogether, unable as of yet to steel myself for what can't help but be a sink-through-the-grocery-store-floor-in-embarrassment moment.  Gah!  The only even somewhat intelligent explanation I have been able to think to offer this person--and it is flimsy at very best--is that I work with children and thought he meant that "my little ones" at work must keep me busy, but. . . flimsy, like I said.  It is all I have come up with, though--Mike is enjoying my predicament too much to be of any help--so one of these days, I need to bite the bullet, seek out the employee (so he doesn't catch me off-guard and throw me further off my game with an inquiry about my kids' names or birthdays or something), and explain (with a fair amount of charming laughter at my own expense, if I can muster it) our "misunderstanding."  I try to tell myself that nice people are nice people and that they're not going to stop being nice just because I have something embarrassing to tell them, and I know the entire encounter, when I do ultimately brace myself to have it, will only take a few seconds, but I am just not ready to deal with this yet, and day after day, I have not been ready.  And that, dear readers, is why I have been doing my food-shopping between 6-7 a.m. this week.  I am actually typing this right after returning from my latest quick-get-to-the-store-before-this-man-starts-his-shift-at-work grocery store jaunt.  How do I get myself into these stupid situations?!  

Photo Booth

Something at work last night reminded me of my and my younger brother's tradition of taking photo booth pictures at the boardwalk arcade on our summer vacations in Ocean City, Maryland as kids. We would beg quarters for the machine off our parents all week to get enough together for our picture-taking sessions. I keep a favorite of these photos in a frame on one of my bookshelves, and it always makes me smile. And sure to make me laugh is remembering how one of our many photo booth ventures was thwarted. I don't remember if the booth was just eating our coins, but it wasn't working, and after a few disappointed seconds, I parted the pleated curtains to go find an arcade employee who could fix it. While my brother waited outside the booth, I nervously approached a group of men gathered nearby and told one of them the photo booth wasn't working. They stared at me in silence for a few seconds while I looked up at them, certain I was impressing my younger brother and all proud of myself for acting like such a grownup. The man I had bravely chosen to address finally spoke up. "You know," he said, "I don't work here." Mortified, I nonsensically replied, "I know." (What?!) I made my way back over to Brian, and soon we were quoting me and laughing as we relived my embarrassment. Clearly, I am the smooth one in the family. :) We were soon howling with laughter, the line becoming funnier each time we said it, and we were still saying it hours later back in our motel room with our parents and older brother. "Yeah," we would chortle to each other, setting off another giggle fit, "I know." And now probably twenty years later, I still can't look at any of our photo booth prints without blushing and laughing.