More Embarrassing Stories From the Vault

Or, Why Never to Trust Your Friends Farther Than You Can Throw Them

As part of my ongoing effort to document every embarrassing moment of my life on the Internet, I have decided to treat y'all to another episode of Embarrassing Stories From the Vault. This one involves my friend Isabel, whom I doubt any of you have met because she's been in Arizona for a couple months and is afraid of the Internet (with all the tubes and such).

Anyway, several years ago the club we belong to was offering some free ballet classes, and Isabel wanted to go. However, she didn't want to go by herself. So she started lobbying me to go with her for at least what felt like several weeks. Although at least by Minnesota standards I am a pretty good dancer, ballet is not really my thing as you can imagine. After much badgering I relented and told her that I would go with her.

Well, the day came around and we showed up and surprisingly it was me and about a dozen women. Actually, about half way through another guy came in. Sure he might have just gotten out of the auditions for the Gayest Man Ever Show, but I was still thankful for the extra testosterone. I don't remember exactly what we did most of the class, probably some stretching and basic ballet moves. I do recall some spinning move which due to my motion sickness did not go over very well (although the focus-on-a-spot-and-then-whip-your-head-around thing works at least pretty well).

At some point the instructor put an exercise ball in the middle of the room and had everyone line up and took turns leaping over the ball using a move I believe is called a jeté (both legs are straight, one forward and one back). Me, being much more of a runner than a dancer, had problems keeping my back leg straight and kept kicking it forward in a hurdle motion. Perhaps you had to be there to appreciate it, but needless to say Isabel thought this was absolutely hiiiii-larious and proceeded to recreate the story to absolutely every person we met for about two months, including pretty much all our mutual friends, women I was hitting on at the bar, strangers on the street, etc. and probably took an ad out in the newspaper to boot.

I think the moral of this story is to never trust your friends, especially when they ask you to do things that you really should have known would result in ongoing shame and ridicule.