The Book of Mormon with Guest Star, Julia Child

So since today was a slow day for embarrassment, my entry will be from a past experience:

It was a long time coming that I had been excited to attend the Book of Mormon on Broadway. I don't generally enjoy Broadway shows because of my infinitesimally short attention span mixed with the constant desire to smoke a cigarette after my first glass of wine.  Wicked: snore.  Chicago: bore.  Sweeney Todd w/ Patti LuPone: old whore. This time turned out to be no different than the many before it.

I had gotten tickets for a friend's Christmas present because we were a) dating at the time and b) both loved South Park with great passion.  My friend is not the smallest of people so, naturally, he got to sit closer to the aisle and I was left to play audience roulette with whomever sat down next to me on the other side.

Along comes a family of five or six led by an elderly lady (most likely the grandmother) who flops into the seat next to me. This old woman happened to have a bit of a weight problem, and it was all I could do to ignore the fact that she was spilling over into my seat through the armrest, poking through the space underneath and slumped over the top.  Imagine sitting next to a jumbo trash bag filled with water...that's what it was like.  Sweaty condensation and all.

Anyway the show began, and as you can probably guess, I was already annoyed. Luckily I had my tumbler filled with wine (see ridiculous photo at top) to quell my unrest.  Then the music started...

When the songs began, I noticed that this old bag was dancing in her seat along with the music. I was so annoyed at this woman as she shook her knee and swung her arm to the beat of the band.  It was just not cute for someone of her size and sweatiness to be moving so much while squeezed in tight next to another human of normal to slightly above average proportions (me).  I leaned into my friend and told him, "This bitch needs to sit next to someone who loves her!"

Perhaps not the nicest thing I could have said, but given the circumstances, who could blame me... I don't think that she heard me. She was, however, definitely starting to notice that i was purposefully pulling my knee away from hers and leaning into my friend to avoid her strange seat-dance.  Then a funny thing happened: the music stopped...and she kept dancing...and I realized that she hadn't been dancing at all.

She had Parkinson's and was doing all she could to suppress the jitters. Luckily by the time i realized this, it was intermission.  I made my friend sit next to her when the curtains rose for the second time...The hell sequence that followed the intermission was slightly more poignant, i think, given the course of the night.