err i cant edit...it should say my ex gf's dad caught me and my ex making out on his bed when he first met me.
This is from my freshman year of high school, several years back. I'm on the freshman team for my high school, Eisenhower, and we're playing Katy, I think. The stands are surprisingly packed, and we're going neck and neck up until halftime. I get to start at point guard for the second half. I usually played the two, so I'm thinking to myself, "Let me just go out there and be aggressive." For some reason, the ref lets us take it out at mid-court. I flash up and get the ball, and I take off full-speed to the other side of the court, ready to get my team off to a quick start. I'm thinking to myself, "Hell yeah, easy bucket," because no one else is following me. I do the prettiest looking lay-up, and all I hear is laughter. I was called 'Wrong Way' the rest of the season. To make matters worse, we ended up going into overtime and losing. Other than that, I don't give a **** about being embarrassed.
My band was playing a private party for a black guy’s parents 50th anniversary in Austin a few years ago. You’ll understand why I mentioned his race later. Anyway, the itinerary for the gig was he wanted to make a short welcome speech and then get right to the party. We were going to start with our funk set (lots of Earth Wind and Fire, etc.) so our band leader suggested we all wear sunglasses and these gigantic afros that he recently bought. He’s black, so no racism. Since I have to set up my in-ear monitor before we start, I usually sneak onstage early and quietly get set up while everyone else is still offstage. So the bandleader told me to go ahead and put on my sunglasses and afro because we’re going to start right when his speech is over. The speech was only supposed to be a minute or two... So I get onstage with my gigantic afro and start setting up. Well…..the speech ended up being about 30 minutes. So here I am, pretty much the only white guy in the room, sitting onstage by myself wearing sunglasses and a gigantic afro for half an hour! I’ve never wanted to sink into the floor and disappear more than I did that night.
i have a few..... I was walking home one day and a bus drove past me with one of my mates on the back seat by the window, I turned round and it started to pull into a bus-stop, so i ran to catch it up and as i caught up with it i banged on the window to get the attention of what I thought was my mate... the guy sitting by the window turned round and was someone who i have never seen before in my life. I'm standing there just staring at this guy and he's just staring straight back, felt like i was there for hours. bus pulls away and i piss myself laughing all the way home. First year of secondary school and no-one really knew anyone that well yet, I was gagging for a ****e so at lunch i went to the toilets nearest to our form room and proceeded to unleash hells fury. It was taking quite a while and the smell was making my eyes water, I was in a bad way.... a few kids came into the toilet for a chat followed by a couple more going for a jimmy riddle, all the while choking, coughing and berating my offensive anal leakage.. I decide I have to wait it out and let them all leave before i come out, otherwise i'll never live it down.... i wait what must have been 20 minutes, listening, making sure they have all left.... I hear the door shut behind the last guy and jump out.. he comes back in as he left his bag in the toilets, i'm busted and he proceeds to tell the entire year that it was me who dropped the atomic bomb in the toilets... Grreeeeeat! Another time i was dropping my girlfriend off home and always parked over the road so we could get a little frisky (17 year olds...) i had her top pretty much off and was having a taste of her baps when her dad knocks on the car door to tell her she's late for orchestra practice.... Last one is a fairly simple case of going down on a bird (the same one as above) and getting a nosebleed... I didnt realise for a while and ended up covering her stomach in blood. Magic.
Been acting on stage for over 30 years, and I think getting used to that sort of thing, and the never-ending parade of mishaps and 'things that go wrong' eventually just sort of make you immune to embarrassment, or at least able to cover for it well enough that you can often turn things to your advantage. Playwrights do not help matters by writing things into their scripts such as gunshots, ANY kind of special effects, or even unreasonably requiring that specific actors actually be onstage when they are supposed to be there, saying the lines they are supposed to say. Some fun examples.. In college, 'The Good Person of Sezuan' (don't ask me why they renamed it, Brecht's title was supposed to be 'The Good Woman of Sezuan'). Anyway, was playing the character of Yang Sun, and in one scene, I was onstage alone with the other lead (the female lead, disguised as a man, a Tobacco Merchant). The scene required another character to come onstage, some rich woman, don't remember the name. Anyway, the cue for her entrance arrives, no actress entering. We do the cue again. Still no actress. This is the worst kind of thing, because everything comes to a standstill for a few seconds, until those remaining onstage decide they have to do.. *something*.. so she says something brilliant like 'So, I see you are admiring my various boxes of tobacco..' Brilliant. All I could do was nod, and say, 'Why yes, I am.' Then, the sound of furiously fast feet running backstage, and then this actress explodes onto the stage, about a minute late, and we were able to carry on. Those moments are horrific. At the old Chocolate Bayou Theatre, they did a really good production of A Christmas Carol several years ago, I was Scrooge, and as you know, at the end of the story, when Scrooge has been through his ordeal, at the end he is filled with joy and energy, and in this particular production, he throws open some invisible windows directly downstage, facing the audience, notices the white snow, is screeching with happiness, etc etc. Well he ALSO happens to see 'Tiny Tim' standing down on the street below, yells out to him, throws him some coins, and tells him to go buy the biggest turkey in the butcher shop. So in this show, we had this kid, maybe 10 years old or so, who got to play Tiny Tim. He shows up early on, and then doesn't reappear until that final scene and the closing bit, you know, 'God Bless Us, Every one!'. So, this show was like 2 hours long, and the way this was supposed to work was, he would actually enter from the lobby, come down the aisle through the audience, where I would see him and yell to him, etc. So one night, we are heading to the end of the show, that scene is comin up, I throw open these windows, start yelling and flapping around, and then realize.. 'boy is not there'. Just.. not there. Crap. So, I yell out to the non-existent boy, then look around for him, didn't see him anyway, so I just continued yelling to the audience that there is SUPPOSED to be a little urchin CHILD here somewhere! Where is that BOY?? .. thinking maybe he will hear and get his little but down there, but no luck. So, I just jumped off the stage, ran up the aisle, ran into the lobby, and there he was, asleep on one of the chairs. I grabbed him, and dragged him back into the theater, and the audience was just howling and cheering. I placed him in his spot, ran back up on stage, and yelled 'Oh, THERE YOU ARE!'.. and then continued the scene. Could have been a disaster, but it was actually pretty memorable because audiences are usually rather sympathetic when things like that happen. Sleuth, at CPH - As Milo, you may know, he gets shot onstage at the very end. That is the worst, because apparently it is impossible to make a reliable stage pistol that actually fires when it is supposed to. I would say, about half the shows, the gun just refused to fire at all. Not fun. Rumors, more gunshots, but offstage. No better when it won't fire though, in one scene, I am supposed to be in a room where a gunshot goes off directly next to my ear, basically deafening me for half the show, but, no gunshot. I waited for it, but nothing, so I picked up this big wooden box, and SLAMMED it down onto the upstairs platform we were on, making a huge BOOM, and then staggered onstage from the 'gunshot'.. ugh. One of the worst was Blythe Spirit. There is a seance scene, were minor things are supposed to happen, like thumping noises, and a table falls over. Well, the brilliant plan was to design this one table used for the seance with a breakaway leg, attached to a fishing-line offstage, so it could be remotely pulled and the table would fall. Al fine, except the line got stuck or hooked on something during one show. And in the scene, this fellow and I are supposed to pick the table up from down left where it was originally, and move it to the center where we would be having the seance. Except.. the table wouldn't move. It was literally tied down to that one spot. The fishing line attached to the table leg was not letting us move it. But we didn't know what the problem was, so we pulled harder, and the table leg just popped right off, so now we are stuck with having to try to use a three-legged table, which was not going to work, or just put it back and grab a different table. The audience is sort of holding its breath, because obviously that was a sort of disaster. So we put the now-three-legged table back where it was, with it now basically propped on a chair. We grabbed a different table, and then I realized I also still needed to bring over the CHAIR that the dead table was now essentially being held by. Everybody could see that I needed the chair. I looked at the audience, I looked at the cast already seated on their own chairs, and then very deliberately walked over, grabbed the chair, YANKED it out from under the table, sending the whole thing crashing to the floor and then OFF the stage into the pit, calmly walked to the others, sat, and we then began the seance. Again, the audience was just clapping and howling. So yeah, stuff like that happens all the time when you do live performances, and if you let it get to you, it CAN be awfully embarrassing, but it just depends on how you deal with it. So, they are not really embarrassing as such, but definitely awkward, no doubt about it.
i won't name names, but some of these stories could be funny if the story tell actually knew how to compose it clearly
I was with 4 friends who I had just met a few months back. They were pretty cool so I thought I'd tell them a story I thought was funny. I was banging this girl doggy while my roommate had her gay friend over. the gay dude comes up to my room to see if we wanted to get dinner with them and knocks on the door. At this point, I had just started making a home video. Gay dude knocks on my door, I said don't come in and he decides to open the door. He screams and stares for like 10 seconds. My girl roommate runs up to see what's wrong and they both catch me mid thrust. My girl is looking at them laughing. My camera pans over to my roommate and her gay friend bc I'm thinking, hey, why not have some cameos in this video. They close the door and go have dinner. We all end up laughing about it. So I tell my 4 relatively new friends about this and they just stood there in awkward silence. Turns out, they are four really super conservative Christians. I think I deflowered 2 of them by just telling the story.
Performance related stories are the best. And never-ending it seems, which is a beautiful thing. When I was in college, our Wind Ensemble was performing at some outside festival in Huntsville and for our big finale, we were supposed to play 1812 Overture. Well, if you're familiar with that piece, there is supposed to be all kinds of noise coming from the percussion section at the end. Our conductor had these Civil War era muskets that he wanted us to fire for the cannon shots. We never got a chance to try them out until the actual performance. He was telling everyone to be prepared because they were going to be jaw-jarringly loud. He even gave us earplugs to wear and told us to point them away from everyone. So we get to the end of the piece where the cannon shots are supposed to happen and we fire off these muskets....and they were about as loud as a child's cap gun you would find in the toy isle of the grocery store. First time we fired them, the look on the conductor's face was just priceless. We started laughing so hard that our eyes were watering and we could barely fire them. The audience was laughing, the woodwind section was laughing. Eh...I guess you had to be there... I never hear that piece without thinking of that day.
I don't have any sophisticated on stage stories but...freshman year of high school we pantsed a kid, but accidentally grabbed underwear as well as pants. All the girls standing outside saw his peen and burst into laughter. He was so shocked that this was actually happening, he didn't pull his pants up, he froze, jaw wide opened, till someone pushed him. He transferred out the next year.
Seriously man? That was weak and not entertaining at all. Dudes are talking about pissing themselves, being the only white guy wearing Afro and sunglasses at a black wedding and you want to talk about people missing their cue? I cant believe I read all that. Not embarrassing enough. NEXT
True, it is pretty lame. I tried to think of worse things, but apparently, living a life trying to AVOID doing stupid things, and not drinking, doing drugs, or attempting to have sex with every female I meet, tends to leave the 'massive embarrassment landscape' rather sparse. On the other hand, don't knock the live performance mess-ups. Many people on this board perform in one way or another and they can all tell you, having hundreds of people staring at you when something goes wrong is not always the most pleasant thing.
This took place in the early 2000s... We live in a very quiet neighborhood. It was a nice, quiet sunshiny day with neighbors in their back yard and screened porches - at least 2 known sets of close neighbors outside relaxing at that time. Even though we have rather large lots, you can easily hear normal conversations because of the bowl we live in. My sons wanted to know if I'd play some ball with them and I told them that I could but I had to poop first. Well while I'm "dropping a deuce", I can hear my loud kids outside, yelling at each other from a good distance as one is down on the swing set and the other playing on the deck - {here is what I hear with the doors and windows closed} Child 1 on the swingset: "Is dad done pooping yet?". Child 2: "What?". Child 1: "I said, is dad done pooping yet?" {louder of course}. Child 2: "I'll check" Child 2 comes inside to check. Child 2: "Are you almost done?" Me: "Almost, but don't go yelling outside about me going poop." SMH Child 2: "OK" Child 2 runs back outside. Child 1: "Is he done yet?" Child 2: "No and he said don't talk so loud about him going poop." Child 1: "What?" Child 2: "No and he said don't talk so loud about him going poop." {louder of course} Child 1: "Oh" {SMH and wondering if it's safe to go outside without some neighborly smirks.}
performance related (mid 70s): during the first break our drummer, bassist and guitarist got busted in the parking lot for one doobie. while some thought it was cool that the band got high, and busted, it was soooo uncool for two of us to take down the equipment with a pissed off crowd watching our every move. (we got rid of the drummer and bassist after that)
