Most Embarassing Things I’ve Done, Part I

Okay, so I figure this is a good use of a Blog: posting the most embarassing things I’ve done, one at a time. It’s congruent with the whole public/private nature of a Blog, and it’s probably more interesting reading than what I did at work today. Okay, deep breath, here goes:

When I was seventeen or so (oh, please God don’t let me have been any older than that), I worked during the three-week winter vacation from Westtown at the Fabric Workshop, a nonprofit textile art gallery in Philadelphia. I helped the Fabric Workshop get ready for their big gala parties by gluing gilding to warehouse walls, picking up 55-gallon drums of glitter, making and collating invitation labels, etc. The work was fun, the atmosphere was congenial, and there were a couple of young artists and seamstresses there that I had a crush on.

Which might have been why I spent the entire three weeks speaking in a fake British accent.

Did anyone catch on? I didn’t think so at the time: nobody knew me there, they must have thought I was some interesting transfer student or something, killing time between terms. Of course, I didn’t take into account the fact that everyone there knew my dad, since he was high school buddies with the workshop’s founder and was the president of the board.

Which might have explained why Christina, the artist I had a crush on, asked me where my accent was from. “It’s Welsh!” I said. “Are you from Wales?” “No, I, uh… had a Welsh roommate for a year!”

The hell of it was, I wasn’t embarassed at the time, but Lordy am I ever mortified now. Especially because I still occasionally run into people I met there, people that first met me when I was spouting a bastardized patois cobbled together from Monty Python and David Niven movies.