Open Thread Posted by Oaktown Girl, 15 Jun 2007 03:54 pm

Open Thread (#13)

By Kiera PSI

Message form the Minister of Justice:
This Open Thread contains a bonus two-fer question:

1. What was your most embarrassing food moment? It can be a restaurant fiasco, as the chef or a dinner guest, dysfunctional family Thanksgiving nightmares, whatever.

2. What was the most embarrassing and/or humiliating public thing a parent (or any adult) ever inflicted upon your teenage or pre-teen self? And looking back at it now as an adult, does it still seem all that bad?

WAAGNFNP overachiever Kiera gives us both in one tale of mother-inflicted terror. All we need to know now is, does it still seem that awful? (I’m guessing “yes”).

Me: a twelve year-old girl on a cruise ship with her parents. A budding teen-to-be, full of hormonal angst, ripe for easy embarrassment. Also at the dinner table: several couples, and a nineteen year-old traveling on his own (the enticing older man!).

Picture the scene…You are expecting gourmet cuisine …but…this is a ship with English Registry. Have you ever eaten in England ? If you’re not into fish and chips, you’re out of luck (okay, so maybe I’m exaggerating, but not by much). Food preparation, cooking and serving styles are not what the typical American expects. And they don’t really explain the differences in their menu. After all, they’re the Empire, the bastion of the civilized world (unless you’re French), so of course everyone will know and appreciate how they do things.

The menu that day featured a choice of “Broiled Rainbow Trout” or “Prime Rib with Yorkshire Pudding”. Almost everyone at the table ordered the beef, with the notable exception of…My Mother. My Mother was the ultimate pragmatist. Nothing phased her…or so we thought. When the entrées were delivered, Lions and Tigers and FISH, Oh My! While the rest of the table denizens took up our forks and steak knives, My Mother stared silently down at her plate. This was no broiled filet of trout, this was a full-on fish, prepared the way “pan fried” trout is served in the States, complete with head, tail, and shiny rainbow scales. Its little dead eye staring up at her accusingly.

I never would have expected this to bother My Mother. But there she sat. She stared, she pointed, she started to sniffle. A few seconds later both our waiter and the maître de (who resembled Captain Bligh) realized something was wrong, and came running. My Mother tried to explain that she couldn’t eat the fish because “it’s looking at me”, so the maître de offered to “fillet” (pronounced like FILL-it) it for her. My Mother looked down at the fish again, looked back up at Captain Bligh, and quavered, “No, I just couldn’t…it’s a friend!”

Trackbacks

Responses to “Open Thread (#13)”

  1. on 15 Jun 2007 at 4:51 pm 1. spyder said …

    Sorry, had to knock on the front door, because i lost my passport during the outside-fence customs officer’s insistence that he search my cavities (i mean i just went to the dentist). And i was going to send the MOJ a com-postable thread about the following, but the topic is germane, and i am trying to do this as secretly and discretely as i can given the environment.

    Last Sunday, i suffered through one of my more embarrassing stage moments. Not to go into too many of the background details, but at last week’s event all three of my production companies were contracted to perform work. For three days i helped to provide infrastructure by which the promoters operated the event. Then i worked on an adventure game, through which ticket holders to the three-day festival could participate in a variety of hands-on activities across the entire human need spectrum (learning about sustainability, greening, and alternative methods etc.). But the toughest role was as the coordinator of emcees and author of scripts and schedules for the 14 stages and three days and nights of performances, speakers, panels, et al.

    Due to a variety of “issues” (human behaviorial/attitudinal/socio-pathic?? and transportative), the schedules were updated each morning and again in the afternoon each day. I was literally forced to sit infront of a laptop and laser printer pumping paper while gofers raced changes to various stages. Finally Sunday afternoon i got a chance to let go, and using my ‘connections’ i allowed my mind to be stretched and plasticized and… (well you get the picture). I am sitting in the back of a small pavilion waiting for Dennis Kucinich to arrive, talking with a phenomenal bass player (well-known band as well as currently touring with a small jazz/fusion/rock ensemble led by a legendary jazz electric guitarist–no more hints), and mellowing out. Out of nowhere arrives a compatriot to tell me the whole thing is changed again, and that the Mayor and State Senator who were to introduce Kucinich and other guests also is not there. I was now assigned to help negotiate the scheduling changes and to introduce Arianna Huffington to the assembled masses in the big main stage area.

    You have to accept that i was looking a bit haggard after a couple of days without sleep (hey now, they couldn’t keep me penned up at night during the late night shows), and looked not only scruffy, but genuinely trashed, and that doesn’t account for my mental state. At least i was wearing a t-shirt a friend had made with the image of Bush in an hourglass draining down into forming a new and better Earth. So i jump in the cart and whizzed off to the main stage back area, and spent the better part of twenty minutes haggling over who goes when, then where, then how. Much too much to try to describe here, but consider that a napoleanic british stage manager who hated any changes, was quite irate already, and furious with this latest interjection of flipflopping and reshuffle. So in comes two limos, one with Kucinich and one with Arianna. I got my good buddy to intro Dennis, and i am to introduce Arianna. I can’t imagine what she must have thought about this strange freak who was about to walk on main stage, calm down the crews, and tell 6000 people how cool she is. I didn’t imagine it either.

    I have no idea what i said or how it came out or what happened really. All i realized in that moment was that i suddenly remembered the three different film crews who were documenting the event. Damn, here i am spaced-out tripping, trying to remember the three whole facts i need to remember, and there are all those pesky cameras. I don’t care about the 6000+ people, hell they wouldn’t remember anything; but a documentary film, a festival DVD production, and a feature film crew using the event as background for small scenes, were right there in front of me with boom cameras, back set shots, and two onstage competing handhelds. Fuck!! fucking god-damn posterity, digitally recorded into harddrives as i am handed the mic by the seething, teeth-gnashing stage manager.

    What’s her name?? What is the name of her new book?? What’s this fearless shit? Whoa. I still don’t really know, and i don’t really want to either. I have tremendous respect for Arianna Huffington for making the paradigm shifts in her own life, for helping and supporting the new media, especially the blogsphere, and for putting herself out there to take the shots. I suddenly was very determined to get off the stage and find the next bite of special chocolate truffle to rid myself of any remnant of memory of all that.

    I am relatively assured that somewhere down the road, some of that will popup on Youtube or MySpace vids or Google vids…Just keep in mind when it does, that part of my was having so much serious fun 20 minutes earlier, and another 20 minutes later. But Dante could not have felt worse in that middle period.

  2. on 15 Jun 2007 at 5:35 pm 2. Oaktown Girl said …

    spyder - that was the best “harsh my buzz” story I’ve ever heard.

    Well, I look forward to seeing it on video somewhere. If you come off looking really, really hippy-dippy (as George Carlin would say), people can blame you for singlehandedly setting the Green & Sustainable movements back 20 years when some right wing nutbag puts it in his “alternative to Michael Moore” movie and all the networks pick up that particular clip and play it over, and over, and over again.

    Seriously, I hope you did better than you think you might have done. And Arianna is pretty cool in my book.

  3. on 15 Jun 2007 at 9:37 pm 3. Oaktown Girl said …

    OK, so we’re all agreed that spyder will be MC’ing the WAAGNFNP World Conference in ‘08? Good.

    Kiera - thanks for posting this weekend’s Open Thread. The angst of remembering my childhood self desperately seeking the attention and approval of those enticing older teenage “men” is too much for me to think about right now. As for embarrassing food-related moments, I’m almost positive I’ve been the cause of other peoples’ embarrassment far more often than I myself have been embarrassed. That’s just kind of the way things tend to go with me, yes? Unfortunately that makes me 0-for-2 for answering the questions. Never fear. I’ll be at a conference all weekend. I’m sure to embarrass myself and/or others in some outrageous way at some point. You probably can remember some stories about me, but I’d prefer you not tell them, especially since I won’t be around this weekend to defend myself set the record straight.

    In the meantime, It’s a week late, but everyone can enjoy my whiny, long-winded response to JP’s Open Thread question here.

    See y’all on Sunday night. Have a good one!

    Image Hosted by ImageShack.us
    (I was gonna post a fish head image, but most of them were just too unsettling).

  4. on 16 Jun 2007 at 6:44 am 4. christian h. said …

    Thanks for all these great stories! Looking back at my teenage self, I realize my parents were actually pretty cool - in that they didn’t insist on barging in on everything I did; so not much chance of embarrassing me (I’m sure I embarrassed them, though). It probably helped that I was (ok, am) a nerd, I’d say. I’ll try to think of a food story…

  5. on 16 Jun 2007 at 8:40 am 5. Kiera PSI said …

    OTG, that’s pretty much what the plate looked like…except there was only the one fish, and there was rice and some greenery around it. Shudder…I can still see it vividly, over 30 years later (I know, I’m dating myself).

  6. on 16 Jun 2007 at 8:08 pm 6. JP Stormcrow said …

    My fish food story (or rather, food story about fish.)

    I have never been much of a seafood fan. In fact, in my youth, never been much of a fan = “would not eat it, period.” I nearly drove my mother to tears of frustration once by insisting on hot dogs, rather than $3.00 fresh whole lobster at a 4th of July festival in a small town we were visiting on the coast of Maine. (this was way, way back… your prices will vary.)

    During my high school years we had a family reunion in Key West one spring break (not a typical trip for my family, by any means). I persisted in being the only living organism in Key West not eating fish for about half the trip. Finally, one night I relented, and ordered some manner of fish. I forget what it was, but it was about the “fishiest” fish you can imagine. However, eat it I did, and for the entire next day I suffered intense gastro-intestinal distress - made all the more pleasant by the fact that, at least then, the whole town smelled vaguely of fish. In fact, I recall the remainder of the trip as a semi-nauseous haze.

    This did little to convince me of the merits of eating our wet little friends, but it din put me off of fish forever, I will occasionally eat a fleshy fish like tuna or halibut, and about the best meal I ever had was freshly caught perch at a camp in Canada.

  7. on 16 Jun 2007 at 8:21 pm 7. christian h. said …

    Well, this story isn’t really food-related, but it happened at dinner time and is fresh on my mind: I’m just back from visiting a colleague. He has two adorable daughters, ages almost 5 and almost 3. The second night of my visit, there was an outdoor Jazz concert we went to, and it was also the outing of his daughters’ preschool. It was dinner on the lawn, music (well, we were kind of far away where the families with children running around were sitting, so not so much music), and all-around fun. When his younger daughter saw me (last time I met her, she was 8 months old), she asked her mother: “Mom, is Christian a boy or a girl?” (my hair isn’t that long!)

  8. on 16 Jun 2007 at 8:26 pm 8. JP Stormcrow said …

    And here is a creative rendering of the Gorillaz song with Dennis Hopper that I mentioned on the Sopranos post. Has it’s own black screen mojo, … but doesn’t draw out the silence long enough.

  9. on 17 Jun 2007 at 8:31 am 9. black dog barking said …

    Plucked from today’s headlines, a story of extinction and redemption, comet-charcoaled woolly mammoths and a continent-wide fireball.

    Of course, today’s headlines vary in their coverage as the various news entities retransmit the experiences of their in-house Blind Hindoos—

    MSNBC:
    concentrates on a possible connection to the disappearance of the Clovis culture.

    San Francisco Chronicle: “comet blast and fireball”, extinction of “mega fauna”, “The shock wave would have spread across the whole continent…”

    Fox News: being up the creek with but a single paddle, “We had no food, and just as critically, none of the key elements of any Siberian field team — no tea and no sugar…”, “some local guys who plied us with vodka and cranberries…”

    As you can see, it is a story with many facets.

  10. on 17 Jun 2007 at 9:22 am 10. JP Stormcrow said …

    As you can see, it is a story with many facets

    Thanks, I had read about this briefly - it’s getting to be like All Fireballs, All the Time, in the natural history of the world. The hell with the creationists and their one puny little flood. Quench this!

    And connections upon connections.
    Following some links took me by Science News, where I found this article on Franco Moretti’s intersting Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. At Amazon the second entry in “Listmania” for the book was a list on Cultural Evolution compiled by one William Benzon. Which in due course led me back to a blog event early last year at The Valve on Moretti. Lots of good stuff there, including several replies by the author.

  11. on 17 Jun 2007 at 1:38 pm 11. Kiera PSI said …

    And here I thought the disappearance of the Clovis culture was due to the institution of the Annual Rodeo and “Big Hat Days”.

    Oh. Wait. You’re referring to prehistoric Clovis, NM, not current era Clovis CA. My bad.

  12. on 17 Jun 2007 at 6:47 pm 12. Oaktown Girl said …

    Thanks for the news updates, Black Dog. And as Kiera can tell you, the words “culture” and “Clovis” (CA) have a very tenuous and shaky connection at best.

    “Quench This!” - JP, I love it! That absolutely has to be our official motto, or at least one of them. It’s definitely going to be the official tag line for the WAAGNFNP World gathering in ‘08.

    And speaking of our WAAGNFNP World Gathering ‘08, I guess that will have to be one of our panel discussions (which I just used my authority as MOJ to volunteer Black Dog to head up): Is the Fireball just as good and still Gojira-approved if it comes from the sky instead? And is it still nuclear at all? I guess with scientific break down involved in all of this, it will have to be covered in perhaps several panels. And just to remind everyone, the MOJ will brook no pre-fireball splinter groups.

    {*Whew!* Good thing we have Kiera on our team now. She could organize 100 blindfolded cats and have them all walking neatly one behind the other in a straight line if she had to. She’s organized tougher things, trust me!}.

    As for the Faux news link, I didn’t see mention the “fireball” at all, so I’m not even understanding their connection to the mammoth story in terms of the “breaking scientific news” in question. Typical. We’ll just add it to the list of charges against them.

  13. on 17 Jun 2007 at 7:16 pm 13. christian h. said …

    As for the Faux news link, I didn’t see mention the “fireball” at all, so I’m not even understanding their connection to the mammoth story in terms of the “breaking scientific news” in question. Typical. We’ll just add it to the list of charges against them.

    Hah! The Man is scared of us, I wager. But the NUCLEAR LIGHT of TRUTH will not be concealed for long.

    christian h.
    Tribunus Laticlavius
    MOOAD, WAAGNFNP.

  14. on 17 Jun 2007 at 8:38 pm 14. christian h. said …

    Hey look, our allies are brutalizing their own people in addition to those of neighboring countries. With our military aid. Yeah I know, old news… nothing to see here, move along…
    Quick, let’s all call for no-fly zones in Darfur to make us feel better.

  15. on 17 Jun 2007 at 11:46 pm 15. Oaktown Girl said …

    Slow weekend in GNF blogville what with Summer starting for a lot of students on the quarter system and Father’s Day today.

    But maybe Father’s Day will bring us some good stories on Monday in answer to our Open Thread questions at the top of the post.

  16. on 18 Jun 2007 at 11:09 am 16. Kiera PSI said …

    She could organize 100 blindfolded cats and have them all walking neatly one behind the other in a straight line

    Sure…blindfolded would be easy. The real trick would be getting them to do it without the blindfold.

  17. on 19 Jun 2007 at 2:50 pm 17. Col K L said …

    Hmmmm, most embarrassing teenaged moment? Sheesh.

    It literally was just that. em bare assing.

    I was sleeping upstairs at K the Navy Seal’s home. I was sound asleep, I mean really out and I seldom do that. Woke up drooling on my pillow, alone and thirsty. Padded downstairs in my birthday suit, semi sleepwallking and slunk into the kitchen for some milk.

    The kitchen was full of men. As in: full Team. As in testosterone laden, hormonally charged, muscular, fit males in the prime of their lives.

    I woke up bigtime at the sight of them. There was a dead silence (if anyone had commented they would have been dead) broken only by my Partner in Crime, the Team Leader, saying “Hi Honey!”.

    I kissed him on the top of his head, got my milk, waved at the room, sauntered down the hall, around the corner and ran up the stairs so fast I don’t remember how I got to the top!

    Drank my milk. Threw myself into bed, crawled under the covers and willed myself into believing it was just a dream.

    Woke up the next morning to a kitchen full of flowers and Thank You notes. LOL

    Hid out for days, wasting away from embarrassment.

  18. on 19 Jun 2007 at 3:54 pm 18. Oaktown Girl said …

    Colonel KL- oops. The question was most embarrassing adolescent/teenage moment inflicted by a parent or other adult (implication: guardian or other parental-type role). If one of your parents was there at the time and was somehow the cause of this…well let’s just say I really hope not!

  19. on 20 Jun 2007 at 6:37 am 19. Kiera PSI said …

    No, OTG, this was a two-fer, remember? It could also be just your most embarassing food related moment. Milk is a consumable nutritional fuel item, so it qualifies.

    Not everyone is as talented (cursed?) as moi to be able to give you both in one incident.

    Besides, this was funny as all hell!