Embarrassing Moments

** Speech given at Toastmasters

Over the course of the previous forty plus years, I have had more than my fair share of embarrassing moments.  Many of the stories are the stuff of legend among my closest friends and not repeatable in mixed company.  However, I do have three awkward experiences I would like to share.  There isn’t any real point or purpose to this speech other than to entertain you, the audience, for the next few minutes.  Are you ready?  Okay, let’s begin.

First is how I was kicked out of a bar in Friendswood, Texas, a suburb of Houston.  One fine Friday evening my two best friends and I went to Capone’s Pizza and Bar, as was our usual weekly routine, to enjoy some brew and a baseball game.  If this place had one TV they had fifty.  All the TVs had been set to air the Astros game, while I wanted to watch the Atlanta Braves game on a different channel.  Logic and reason was lost on the owner of the establishment as I tried to explain how I would gladly take some obscure TV in whatever corner of the restaurant if he would simply allow me to watch the Braves game.  After thirty minutes of my griping about how insensitive this guy was, he told me one more word out of my mouth would result in ejection from the establishment.  Well, guess what?  Several flowery and unbecoming words came out and I was promptly ejected from the restaurant.  The very next day I was enjoying lunch at the soup and salad place I usually ate at two to three times a week.  As I was eating, this lady came up to me and asked if I was the guy who was kicked out of Capone’s Pizza the night before.  I couldn’t help but laugh.  A city of four and a half million people and this lady picks me out of a crowd.  In telling this story to another friend, he said it wasn’t like I was ever going back to that bar.  The strange part is I went back to that place the very next night as if nothing had ever happened.

Next I would like to tell you how I survived a date gone horribly wrong.  On Valentine’s Day 2012 I had a dinner date with a young lady from Tarrant County College, the school in which I was enrolled at the time.  Since I was without transportation, she agreed to pick me up at the house while I, of course, would pay for dinner.  Once at the restaurant we both were seated and promptly ordered our food.  Everything was fine up till that point.  As far as I was concerned, we were simply two friends having dinner; however, we both would have been better off had this been a blind date, or if one or the other of us would have been blind.  She must have felt the same way because she excused herself to the restroom never to been seen again.  Not skipping a beat I ate both her meal and mine just in time to catch the next bus back to the house.  This, folks, is why I don’t date or have any desire to get married.

Finally, how I spent New Year’s Eve in 2003.  Usually I have countless invites for various parties, but I had declined most of them due to having a date for later on that evening.  However, my bad luck struck again with my date bailing on me.  This seems to be a recurring theme.  Determined to not let this phase me or ruin the good time I wanted to have, I drove around Houston crashing New Year’s Eve parties.  Nine o’clock the next morning and 4 parties later, I was apparently done as I woke up on some stranger’s couch.  Severely hungover and hungry, I finally found my car several blocks away with the keys locked inside and a blown out tire.  In the end everything worked out fine as I was able to go home and get cleaned up.  From what I do remember, I had a blast.  Sometimes the spontaneous stuff if far more fun than anything I could have planned otherwise.

As I conclude my entertainment for the morning, I am reminded how I can look back on life, see how the events didn’t turn out as expected, but realize I have grown enough to laugh at how I made it through all that stuff.  Tough times are no fun in the midst of them, but hindsight and maturity (age) has a way of making us laugh at the stuff that happens to us and how we deal with them.  Thank you for humoring me as I tell my stories.  Sometimes I think the best jokes or funny stories are the ones nobody but me understands.