oh no! i look awful in front of 1000s!

i live in a decent sized city. i went to a benefit a week ago for planned parenthood; it was a themed party - an 80s prom. well, i got a text message today. in one of the city's free newspapers, there's a picture of me, standing there in my 80s prom dress, holding a beer and looking...fat and pale. sure, my name isn't attached to it, but how embarrassing!!

will post a picture of said picture as soon as i can make my stupid scanner work.

No one looks good in there 80's prom dress, not then, not now.  Trust me, I was there.

Hear hear!  I ressembled a plump little mermaid by the time I was in a ruffled teal dress and had some kind of hair contraption done by a hair dresser.  That was 1991, so I imagine it was about as bad as the 80s with perhaps smaller hair.

NO!!! Bigger hair!  Oh the horror!

ah, the 80's. :)

whoever took the pic and put it in their newspaper must have thought you looked good!

Let me tell you about my most publicly embarrassing moment, and maybe it'll make you feel better:

A guy in my law class found out that I could sing, and asked me if I'd mind singing a song he'd written at an audition for a competition. I was flattered and agreed, and that's where the trouble began.

First of all, it turned out he hadn't actually WRITTEN a song. He'd written a poem, which he tried to teach me by singing, out of time, in 7 different keys. The tune changed every time he tried to teach me. I wrote down what I could, and tweaked it until it made sense musically.

The second problem arose when he gave me my backing track, which "a friend with a music studio" had promised to make. It was nothing but a basic drumbeat looped 50 times over on FruityLoops. I don't know if you've ever sung with no accompaniment, but you end up hugely out of tune after 3 verses. Luckily I got the track a few days before the competition, so there was time to pay a quick visit to his friend. I'd never used that program before, but I managed at least to add some basic chords to keep me in tune. I took the track home to practice.

The day of the audition, we took public transport from university. We arrived hot and sticky - in my suburb, at a big stage outside the mall on the main road, with hundreds of people watching. I'd kinda expected a bunch of judges in an office, and hadn't even dressed up. We gave in our cd and waited for our turn. The sound guy was getting really annoyed with the singers, because nobody knew how to use the super-close-range mic he'd given them, so they weren't coming through. He was yelling at them over the sound system!

I'd agreed to introduce the song by looking dreamy and saying it was about summer parties where you spot the girl you wish hadn't broken up with you. But the sound guy was in a bad mood, so I said "this song is about those summer-" and he cut in to yell "Name. Name of song. Start singing." and put on the music before I was ready. The cheap music program had made a really quiet track, and I couldn't hear it at all through the monitors. And I was no better with the mic than the other contestants. The crowd couldn't hear me or the music, and the sound guy stopped the music before I could do the little a capella twiddly bit at the end (it was really bad R&B, ok).

I slumped back into my seat, only to see my head of department and at least two family friends in the audience. The next time we met, we had that awkward conversation like where you've had such a bad haircut that people can't even pretend to like it and they just say "oh, you've cut your hair."

So that's my very long story that may or may not make you feel any better. On the upside, I'm no longer nervous about being in the public eye - I've already made the biggest fool of myself I can imagine, so it can only get better from here on!