EMBARRASSMENT

It's happened to all of us.

Your body temperature rises twenty degrees. Your face burns red, your stomach drops to the ground, your palms sweat.

What an uncomfortable feeling.

Embarrassment.

The word alone incites a rush of memories. Some of them awful...some of them quite funny. I guess I'll share a couple of the humorous stories and maybe one mortifying tale.

Being an entertainer allows you an incredible amount of opportunity to embarrass yourself. Especially when you are singing five and six nights a week. It's hard to be "on" every one of those nights...but you sure do try. When you're standing on stage and you notice people watching you, you want to deliver the very best performance you can possibly muster. You allow yourself to get caught up in the moment, let the passion take over, and just let yourself go along for the ride.

So I would dash out into the audience and trip up the stairs...or try to toss my microphone from one hand to the other and watch as it hit the ground. Or there was the time I was in the middle of belting out a song and strutting across the front of the stage (which was four sections of stage that had been added to accommodate our stage show) and getting my 4 inch "Wild Pair" zebra shoe caught in the crack and walking right out of it--the shoe, that is. Well, I just kept going, one shoe on, one shoe off. It's kind of hard to sell a song when you're hobbling along... up, down, up, down...but the show must go on.

Singing that many nights a week is tough. So of course there were the times that I would crack, or nothing, no sound at all, would come out. But you learn to live with it I guess. One of the most embarrassing but funny moments that I can remember happened while singing a Madonna medley and doing choreography with the other lead singer in the band, Jamie. First of all, let me say that Jamie could really dance. I can dance okay, but I'm not a natural. I can pick up almost any dance move, but I don't have the finesse that some people just naturally have. So anyway, here we are dancing and singing, and we do this move where we step in with our left foot and then sort of kick our right foot out to the right. Well, when I stepped in with my left foot, I put the heel of my shoe into the cuff of my right pant leg. As I forcefully kicked my right foot out, I pulled my left leg out from underneath me and fell HARD to the ground.

If I had been sitting in the audience watching that, I would have been on the floor laughing my butt off. It happened so fast. I don't even know what I was thinking. I just looked up at Jamie and said "Hey, you forgot to fall! Remember we were supposed to fall here?". I don't remember her response...she was probably laughing along with everyone else. Although it was an embarrassing moment, it was pretty comical.

I guess now I will tell you about an incident that to this day bothers me. Again, it happened one night while I was singing. I must preface this story by telling you that, when I was very young, our younger sister B.J. would fall asleep in her high chair with her eyes open. They were kind of rolled half way back into her head and it was quite a bizarre sight to see. So anyway, one night while performing at a club that was attached to a dining room, I glanced over and saw a family of three sitting there enjoying our show. Mother and Father were watching intently and I noticed that the little girl seemed to be sleeping with her eyes open. Witty as I am, I decided to comment on how my sister used to fall asleep with her eyes open, too. But I couldn't just stop there. I made a few comments on how nobody could ever sneak up on her while she was sleeping and so on and so on. Even our bass player jumped in and we both kind of laughing about how cute she was.

Well... we came to a song in our play list that I had no part in, so I left the stage and went out and sat in the audience to listen. A waitress approached me and handed me a note. I assumed it was a request, but when I opened and read it, I could have crawled under a rock and died. It simply said "that little girl is not sleeping, she is blind." I was completely mortified. I looked up quickly to see if they were still there so I could go to them and apologize, but they had left. I know in my heart that I did not mean anything hurtful by what I had said, but still... incredibly embarrassed!

Really, my whole point in writing this is because I'd love to hear your stories. Please, do share. I think it's great medicine to be able to look at ourselves and laugh at the dumb@** things we sometimes do.

ALSO, I was thinking that maybe you would like to suggest a topic that you would like to discuss. I think it would give me a challenge to write about something that might be outside of my comfort zone. PLUS... I like writing about anything that gets you all writing!

But for now...What is your most embarrassing moment?

SIS Bren