My Most Embarrassing Moment...

I'd like to say it was the time in 1975 when I was learning how to read. I read just about everything in sight, or tried to, in a child's piping voice. A packed donut shop. A miraculous simultaneous lull in thirty conversations allowed my three-year-old self to step right up and confidently read the sign over the counter:

Open! 24! Whores!

Naw, that doesn't count...because I had no idea why everybody was laughing at me.

How about this?

JULY 2, 1988: Niagara Falls, Ontario

It was a hot day.
Beastly hot--the kind of heat where you feel like you're breathing wet gauze. My mom and stepdad had taken me here, somewhat on the spur of the moment. I was having a great time roaming the assorted kitchy, tacky cheese on Clifton Hill, when, in the immortal words of Ace of Base, I saw the sign.

I locked eyes with the The "Be A Star!" sign and was guided as if by tractor beam to the video karaoke place...the first one I'd ever seen, or indeed heard of. For a shower-singer like me, it was an irresistable attraction.
My stepfather took me aside and warned me. "Don't try", he said. "You sing much better when you don't try."
Oh, if only I had listened.
I scanned the list of songs with a jaundiced eye. In that glorious year of 1988 there were literally dozens of songs I knew by heart: I'd croon to imaginary girlfriends (well, in my imagination, they weren't imaginary at all) every day.
None of those songs seemed to be here.
Wait a second...there's George Harrison's (I Got My Mind) Set On You. I know that one. It's not my favorite, and it's near the top of my vocal range, and the lyrics are a bit banal, but the sentiment's there. As a lovestruck teen, I'm pretty big on sentiment.

It's necessary for you to visualize me if you want to get the full embarrassment effect. Picture it: a reedy, bespectacled, geeky boy with acne, dressed in...well, my apparel demands a paragraph to itself.
I was clad in a bathing suit. It had wide horizonal stripes of yellow, red and blue, and went down most of the way to my knees. Above that, a red Canadian Tire T-shirt. Below, sneakers, and white socks worn about as far up my legs as I could stretch them. This was, of course, back when I hadn't yet learned there was a big difference between 'making a fashion statement' and 'looking like a complete fool'.

The first step was to choose the background for my video. I paged through the selections until I saw one composed of wide horizontal stripes of...you guessed it...yellow, red, and blue. It completely matched my bathing suit, and I was under the impression that this was a good thing.

Next, a practice run through the song with George audible in my headphones. I had the words down cold and didn't need the backup...I nailed it. I think I outsung the old guy. This was gonna be so cool...

Finally, my big chance. I fixed a picture of my Crush-of-the-Month in my head, took a deep breath, and started to belt it out. About three lines in, several trains collided in my head and re-arranged a chunk of mental geography.
First: this song isn't near the top of my vocal range...it's well beyond it.
Second...hey, Ken! You know how half the world's been saying you have a voice like an angel, and the other half thinks it sucks like an Electrolux? Yeah...the first half neglected the word 'fallen', and Christ that vaccuum cleaner's LOUD!
Third: ummm, you might want to MOVE a bit, instead of standing there rooted to the ground.
Fourth: Nope, nope, stop that moving business, now you look like a rusted-out robot.

I heard somewhere that if you want a job at the Stag Shop, you must take a thorough tour of the place, examining each object for sale...without laughing. I think a similar policy just had to be in place at this karaoke video joint, because nobody was laughing at me.

I was horrified with myself, but I'm not a quitter. For three minutes and eleven seconds I stuttered and stutter-stepped on autopilot through that song. All I could think of was that scene in Phantom of the Opera where the Phantom curses Carlotta and turns her voice into that of a frog. When the tumult died, I fairly leaped out of the booth, only to be confronted with the crowning horror: the sight of my own self on a huge television beaming out over Clifton Hill. I was stiffly swaying back and forth and because of the background I had chosen, I had no waist. There was a disembodied head and torso not-so-gaily cavorting over a...gap...and beneath that, a pasty, anemic-looking bit of leg wrapped in absurdly long socks...
...and damn it all to hell, there's an audio track.

People were looking up and wincing. Quite a few were giggling and one set of girls was laughing fit to piss themselves. I wanted to find the nearest hole and jump into it.

That video has only been seen by people I'm really close to...it's my own relationship test. It's impossible to watch the thing without laughing--I've tried many a time and failed myself. I wait for the laughter to start up and listen very closely to see if any of it's malicious. If so, I'm outta there.

In the meantime, I've never done another of those things and never will. And my voice is still not half bad...unless I try. Then it's wholly bad.