Things That Go Bump In The Night

If you’re lucky, once in a lifetime an opportunity will come along that will change the entire course of your future.  Friday night was such an opportunity for me.

My friend’s husband plays in a band and she invited several of us to come out and hear him play.  The band was fantastic, but there was something bigger than all that.  Do my ears deceive me or did they just announce a “most embarrassing story” contest?  OMG.  If ever a contest was made for me, this was it.

So naturally I went for it.  I figured my refused-to-check-my-coat story was the most entertaining, and the most embarrassing.  Well let me tell you, the crowd went wild.  Begging and screaming that I stay on stage and tell more stories.  Begging I tell you.  But as painful as it was, I had to tear myself away from the mic and the roaring crowds and go back to my table.  And since I know some of you are going to worry about it; no, I did not stumble, fall or inadvertently take out any persons or things as I walked back.

But alas, I didn’t win the contest; I took 2^nd place out of 2.  The story that won the contest involved exposure of a female body part, so I feel like it had an unfair advantage.  Besides, what better ending to an embarrassing story contest than to lose the contest?  It’s embarrassing and somehow perfectly fitting.

The music was great and I ended up dancing, but for the first time, my bad dancing paled in comparison to another woman’s, well, sideshow.  She glided up to the dance floor and began swaying and moving to music, but not the music that was being played.  In her mind, she was somewhere far far away.

She twirled around in her skirt, and randomly poked at the air with her index finger in a move that looked to be the bad love child of Saturday Night Fever and Walk Like an Egyptian.  She reached both arms high up over her head and contemplated the ceiling for a few minutes and then just shuffled her feet on the floor for a while, staring off into space.  She was singing something, but it was definitely not the song the band was playing.

Just as we were taking all that in, a gentleman got up from his table and headed toward the dance floor.  As he walked he started doing this very odd warm-up maneuver, shaking up and down his whole body as if he was possessed.  Out of nowhere, a leg would kick out, or an elbow.  He picked up Ms. Thing’s move and began to randomly punch air with his index fingers too.  And every once in a while he would just shimmy and shake for an uncomfortable amount of time.  It was as if he was being electrocuted but the pain was inflicted upon the rest of us.

The poor guys in the band were now staring down at the floor, biting their lips in order to keep from laughing.  Normally it’s unkind to comment on others’ dance styles, but this was straight out of a movie…a bad movie.  We noticed that everyone all around us was squirming and pointing and staring off into space in an attempt to learn these hot new dance moves.  Admittedly, this odd couple could keep a crowd entertained—we were all in hysterics.

So all’s well that ends well.  A fun evening with some good friends, a great band, a chance to be on stage, and people drawing more negative attention to themselves than I can even dream about.  Life is good.