Once, I was about to play a show at a place called the Elbow Room in Ypsilanti MI. The doorman there was a guy named the "Great Scarboni." Scarboni was (is) a magician and he's particularly skilled at card tricks. So much so, that you inevitably leave his presence wondering what the fuck he just did?!
He'll make you question your own perceptions.
After asking him why he didn't go to Vegas, NYC or LA to pursue his career further, Scarboni told us about how his mother had terminal cancer and how he was her primary care-giver.
Scarboni: "I'll never pursue magic further because I have to care for my mom while she's alive"
Me: (raises pint glass in the air) Here is to you never getting to pursue magic then.
in my head, what I was saying is that I hope his mom lives forever. What it sounded like I was saying is she will never recover. It was fucking stupid of me
Everyone looked at me like I had personally just euthanized his mom. I immediately realized how insensitive I had been.
This is one of the biggest regrets I have regarding something I said that I wished I hadn't.
What are yours?
Before an exam in college, the professor asked that everyone sit every other seat, and keep the left-handed desks open for the lefties. A girl nearby got up and sat down one seat away from me, and said, "I'm not left-handed." I smiled and joked "You can always pretend for the test." A few minutes later as she passed the tests to me for our row, I realized that she had no left hand.
I think we have a winner. That one really takes the cake. How did she react to your comment?
Back when I was a college teacher, a student had missed the first three classes of my course. When he finally showed up, I said something off-hand like "I guess this course isn't too high on your priority list." He said, "I was having a round of chemo for my cancer." (??!!) Similar situation, student said, "I had to go to (insert far-away place) to donate bone marrow for my relative's leukemia." Long ago, I was volunteering for the food co-op, taking orders. I am sitting. Attractive man standing next to me is giving me his order and flirting with me. I run my hand under the bottom of his jeans...looking for some skin. I go higher and higher and finally say, "Your boots go up really high." He says, "It's a wooden leg."
(True story.)
I confess I giggled when I read this. Not sure how the crip community would respond. I guess if they are inclined towards giggling, they would. My beloved friend Doug spent all of his adult life in a wheel chair after a car accident left him a paraplegic. I used to stroke his leg all the time. Doug's the guy who said relationships are like car crashes in my blog here. Maybe if he knew I'd been stroking his leg all that time, he would have felt differently.
I can't think of any specific instances, but early on I learned the power of having a good comeback. It really bothered me as kid when I experienced l'esprit d'escalier and so I worked on it. Unfortunately, I got to be very good at it, to the point where when insulted or even mildly slighted, a barb would leave my mouth almost automatically. That, combined with my naturally sharp tongue, has resulted in more than a few regrettable interactions. I will admit though, that I enjoyed it for a while, as it usually got laughs when I was a kid. Now, I make a real effort to think before I speak.
You'd like that wouldn't you? But you'd never get that far even in an indie film which is way easier because you'd be too busy delivering pre-emptive barbs of questionable justification based on comically mixed and missed signals, thus detonating all potential interaction on a deeper mental or physical level. This would also probably be a metaphor for two other things.
Senior year of high school. Standing around after school with a couple of friends making inconsequential conversation. I have the maturity of... well, a high schooler and make a "your mom" joke. Her mother had died a few years earlier. I stood there for half a beat before I realized who I made that "joke" to and just walked away. I like to pretend that it never happened.
That 'your mom' bit has happened to me before too. The response I got was 'my mom is dead you fuck!'. Not my best day.
I used to work at a restaurant with sounds_sound and I would ask new servers to ask him how many pushups his dad could do and without skipping a beat, and in a completely believable way he would say "my dad only has one arm." It was hilarious, because it was fake. Yours... not so hilarious.
When I was studying abroad in Wellington, New Zealand, there was a District 9 special screening at the Embassy Theater (where they have all the premiers for LOTR/Hobbit stuff). It was happening because the concept art book for District 9 was being released and they had all the guys from WETA there to talk to people and sign the books. Among them was Daniel Falconer, who was the main person in charge of putting this whole book together. I was mostly interested in his amazing contributions to the Lord of the Rings films and I really wanted to just say hello or whatever and sign a little piece of paper for me. Finally I get up to him and say hi, he asks me where I'm from, I say I'm from the States but studying here blah blah. Then he asks me if I have the book they are selling. I respond "No, I'm too cheap for that." I can still see the look of surprise/disbelief on his face. Luckily the friend I was with tried to help me out and said really quickly "Yeah, we're too poor because we're college students, ya know?!".
In highschool, I once suggested to a friend that the weather, being so terrible lately, was enough to make me want to kill myself. I had forgotten - somehow - that two weeks earlier my friend had discovered her dead boyfriend in his bedroom after he shot himself in the stomach. Timing was never my strong suit. We're not friends anymore.
This one time a few months back I bumped into a guy I know and we got to chatting. Asked what he was up to, he said he was on a farm these days, and I said "that's cool". Really, I'd managed to mishear him somehow, and he'd actually said that he'd inherited his father's farm, who had just passed away.
Did the guy seem perplexed at how his situation could be construed as "cool?"
He just looked at me and said "you think it's cool that my dad is dead?"