Let’s go way back here and talk about the first time I really recall being embarrassed. This is an old old memory, might be one of my oldest in fact. But because I was so ashamed, it’s one I haven’t let go of quite yet.
It’s 1990, I’m just three years old, most of my days are spent at my mom’s Jazzercise studio downtown. No one’s really surprised my mom owned a Jazzercise studio, right? I didn’t think so. My brother and sister are in school (thank God) so I get to spend every day to myself in the studio while my mom teaches the afternoon classes. Unlike most children, I loved being alone. The other kids just didn’t play “right” so I enjoyed a good playroom all to myself. Sidenote, I can truly remember going over to friends’ houses when I was little and I’d sometimes actually ask them to go play in the other room so I could play with their toys by myself. If you’re not going to play Barbies correctly and according to the wonderful script I have planned out, then just don’t play at all. Am I right or am I right?
Anyway, I spent my days at Jazzercise day dreaming, coloring shitty pictures of cats, and eating pounds and pounds of greasy tator-tots from Tastee Treat.
One particular day I happened to notice a lot of people walking by the front window and a new fun idea suddenly popped into my tiny bizarre brain. Why not give these people a show?
So for reasons I still can’t explain, I decided to pull down my pants and sit in the front window with my bare ass cheeks pressed against the glass.
I was so nonchalant about it that from where my mom was instructing on her stage, it appeared I was just chilling in the front window like I usually did. And so I sat there like that for a good twenty minutes just mooning everyone who happened to be strolling downtown Norfolk. It was all fun and games until my mom’s class was over and someone who had left already came back inside and narked on me.
“Um your daughter’s ass is hanging out in the front window.” Maybe the lady who told on me said that, maybe she didn’t. I’ll never know.
Regardless my mom immediately yanked me from my own peep show and scolded me in front of all of the other women who hadn’t left yet. It was humiliating and shameful and no one seemed to appreciate the humor in it like I had hoped they would.
I wouldn’t be this embarrassed again for a long time. Not until my dad would find me reading his Dennis Rodman book “Bad As I Want To Be” alone in my room a few years later.
*Just to give you some reference here’s a photo of me from around this time, so I’m clearly going through some stuff…
*Tomorrow’s prompt: Facts About You!
This is hilarious haha! And in regards to the barbies.. you are 100% right. My three year old self and your three year old self may have been able to leave our separate rooms and actually play together because I also believed in a social etiquette that inevitably came with playing barbies or anything else for that matter.