Meme-ries

“Meme-ries”

Dorky Dad did it. I’m pointing a finger, and it’s not my pointer finger.

At any rate, I jump here, in this post, fully into the life and times of Blogville. Make me mayor for a day, woncha? City keys and all?

So, yes, I’ve been tagged with a meme. And even though these memes feel like chain letters, I’m doing it, and not just to avert seven years of bad luck. I’m supposed to tell you Six Weird Things That Have Happened to Me. Since I consider every blog post thus far an account of something weird that’s happened to me, I may find myself stretching for fresh material. Maybe I could turn this meme into Six Weird Vomit Stories, as those seem to be heaving themselves at me fast and furious in the last month.

However, I’ll attempt to abide by the rules. Since I don’t do that when I drive or converse (I speed and interrupt), this, too, may be a stretch.

Here are the parameters, according to Dorky Dad: “…each player starts by blogging about six weird things about themselves [sic]. Those tagged must also blog the rules in their blog while tagging a half a dozen people of their own. It’s also important to inform the tagees that they’ve been tagged.” He then went on to adjust the subject this particular meme, so that the topic is about six weird things that have happened to the blogger in question.
Here goes:

1) I received my first kiss as an adolescent when I was trick-or-treating. My pals and I rang a doorbell, and a drunken teen answered. His name was Randy. He propped himself against the doorframe, gave us all some Bottle Caps, and then swooned over how cute I was in my costume. Smelling of something Genuinely Drafty, he leaned in and whispered at me, spittle on his lips, “Can I give you a little kiss?” Because I had no self-esteem and couldn’t believe that any male would *ever* want to kiss me for being cute (I was ten, and it already seemed like a drought), I nodded shyly. It was quick and, yup, spittle-ridden. My knees got soft, and suddenly my pillowcase of candy felt very heavy.

I was dressed that year as Pippi Longstocking. To aid my braids in standing straight out from my head, my mother had bent a wire hanger over my head and braided my hair around it.

Weird thing? The name Randy.

2. In high school, I was deeply into forensics. No, you CSI fans, you and your slow-motion bullets should sit back down and stop waving your remote controls in the air so excitedly. I mean competitive speech tournaments. Like “Hi, my original oratory today will expose how ludicrious contemporary advertising is, and I will refer to the commercial featuring figure skater Peggy Fleming throwing a pack of chewing gum into a swimming pool as evidence.” Like, “I totally am advancing to finals in Lincoln-Douglas Debate this weekend!” Like, “I cannot even believe how unprofessional those poster boards looked for the extemporaneous speech on horror films. The blood on them was sooo obviously catsup. What judge would be fooled by that?”

At any rate, in 1984, on the way home from a speech tournament one weekend, our bus pulled over in Belgrade, Montana (this is still not the weird part), at about midnight, so’s all of us hyper and hungry teens could up our blood sugar even further (after four or five in an hour, Pixie Stix start to lose their punch) with stacks of pancakes at an all-night diner. I was ten feet inside the door of the joint when I was frozen to the linoleum. There, in a vinyl booth, eating their own stacks, were the members of none other than…

Night Ranger.

I can hear your intake of breath as you read this, you know.

But you need to breathe. Exhale, already. Yes, I typed Night Ranger. You read me right.

They of “Sister Christian” fame. They were chillin’. They were eatin’. They were chattin’. They were motorin’. And what was their price for flight?

A diner full of MTV-struck forensics geeks, that’s what.

After all lurching to a halt simultaneously, the 40 or so of us on the team quickly became overly casual–we sure as cattle rustlers weren’t going to give those megastars a chance to think we were some dumb Western bohunks who’d never seen a metal hair band live and eating pancakes before. So we shuffled, en masse, to a group of booths, where we talked frantically of everything *except* the rockers in our midst. Animatedly, we ordered, dug our fingernails into each others’ legs under the table, and hissed discreetly, “OMIGOD. OMIGOD. THEY ARE SO HOT. WHAT SHOULD WE DO? SHOULD WE DO ANYTHING?”


Eventually, my natural leadership emerged, and I decided to take charge of the moment and make it last forever, much like a newlywed who gifts his bride of three months with diamond tennis bracelet from Zales.

Grabbing my placemat, only slightly smeared with blueberry syrup, I marshaled two of my entourage and goosestepped us over to The Table of Ranger. Drawing upon all my speech training, I looked them firmly in the eye, gestured confidently from above the waist, and imbued my tone with a natural and conversational rhythm, squeaking oratorically, “Excuse me, Mr. Rangers of the Night, we all here [gesturing widely] think you are super–er, *immensely*–talented and are ever so very honored that you have come to our fair state of the big sky, so could I have your autograph on this placemat to commemorate this monumental happening?”

That placemat still lives in a box in my basement. After eight rounds of fisticuffs and team debate back out on the bus, I stepped in as the judge and decided I had won the autograph tournament. The trophy was mine.

3) One time when I was performing during the half-time show of the Super Bowl (*ahem*: Super Bowel), I was part of a really embarrassing ‘wardrobe malfunction.’ My costar and I had practiced and practiced our choreography for three whole minutes before the show, but then, in the heat of the floodlights, something went terribly wrong, and suddenly my fellow chanteur reached over and ripped the leather right off my potential-baby-nursing-equipment, leaving me exposed and feeling a rhythm-nationed loss of control.

I was so distraught I had to call up my nephew JerMajesty for a comforting chat about colonics.

4) In my junior year of college, I spent a whole lot of late-night hours playing cribbage and drinking from a keg-o-liter in the dorm room of my posse, which consisted of one guy named Rick. Oh, and sometimes a guy named Rolf. Everyone else was asleep at 3 a.m., as we pegged and nibs-ed and skunked and gulped and chugged.

One night, full of Leinenkugels, having suffered the blow of yet another great cribbage loss, I took a restorative break in the bathroom, an adjacent room that consisted of one stall and two sinks. As I sat relaxing and chanting “fifteen-two, fifteen-four, fifteen-six…,” I heard the door open.

“Um, hi, I’m *in* here,” announced me.

“Yea, Joce, I know, but I gotta go,” said The Rickster.

“Well, you’re going to need to wait a minute ’til I’m done,” I countered.

“Naw, I’m already going right now,” Rick assured me.

Bwah? Then he turned on the tap and gave the sink a quick swirl of cold water, kindly cleansing it of his urine before I would need to wash my hands.

Chivalry was not dead.

5. In 1993, in the mountains outside of Leadville, Colorado, I camped in the back of a Chevy Van with Then-Beau. At somewhere between 11,000 and 13,000 feet (oxygen deprivation fuddled my mind), the night air was chill, and I could not stop shivering, even under under a Mexican blanket and with my hood cinched around my face. My nose, in particular, was the temperature and consistency of frozen yogurt.

In a gesture of affection, Then-Beau formed an O shape with his thumb and fingers, placing the O over my yogurt-nose, to warm it up. Promptly, he fell into a deep sleep, as the men in my life do when laying next to me. My nose gradually warmed, and I, too, dozed off. Six hours later, I awoke, the O hand still clamped to my beak.

I was a little touched by his unconscious devotion to my schnoz. But mostly, the O-print that remained on my face for the next two weeks was, well, a little weird.

6. As I wrote recently, my dad was addicted to the tv game show Jeopardy; from my teens, I regarded Alex Trebec as a clipped and slightly-condescending uncle who visited our home every afternoon at 4:30. I didn’t know what he was all about, but he seemed smart and as though a mojito might do wonders for his disposition.

As I got older, watching the show became more gratifying for me because I could actually answer some of the questions. And then, in college, I realized I could answer a lot of the questions. Tacitly, my dad and I came to the understanding that we were really good at this show. We could yell out answers at the tv and pretty much be right.

Certainly, this was not a phenomenon enjoyed by thousands, nay, millions of other fans across the nation. Surely, this armchair mastery of question asking in categories like “Bird Talk” and “Medieval Europe” was unique to us. We knew we were good, and our abilities were rare.

Thus, you can imagine our excitement when Jeopardy announced it was coming to our town for a contestant search. Clearly, we would go through the motions of taking their little test and jumping through whatever other hoops they’d hold up for us (demonstrating aptitude at clicking a button or enunciating, “I’ll take ‘Cheeses of the World’ for $400, Alex”), but equally clearly, at least one of us would be taking a trip to a television studio in Culver City, California, where we would garner fame, money, and, ultimately, a return trip to the Tournament of Champions.

The day of the audition, we waited in line for hours, as the queue snaked around a downtown building. Eventually, we made it into the crowded testing room, feeling confident that the prescreening quiz was just a formality–a weeder–and soon we’d be in a much smaller room, with the real candidates, giving genuinely challenging questions to their advanced-level answers.

When the ten-answer pretest was handed out, I treated it like the SAT’s, kicking back for some free-flowing brain-snapping fun. But, hmmmm, the first answer was not exactly one onto which I could mindlessly jot down, “What is malaria?” In fact, I couldn’t think of anything to jot down. Skipping the ones I didn’t know, I soon found myself on answer number five, which I *guessed* was, “What is saffron?”

Then again, it could have been cinnamon. I wasn’t, technically, sure.

This test was actually kind of, um, hard.

At the end of the allotted time, our tests were collected, and then the correct questions were revealed.

As it turns out, I got two of the ten questions correct. This score was average, and only two people out of the room of hundreds were heading to the next round of testing. My dad and I, however, with our wide-open schedules, were heading to the Perkins to slurp soup served in breadbowls.

Harumph. How very weird the whole thing was: the one time Jeopardy administered an uncharacteristically difficult pre-screening test was when they held their search in my hometown. Any other time, I *know* we would have made the cut.

Why, later that very day, we were back in our lounge chairs at home, watching Alex quiz his contestants, and I’ll be dadgummed if we didn’t get every question right.

—————————–
To continue the meme, I lay down the “Six Weird Things That Have Happened to Me” gauntlet at the feet of Rocco, Emily, Choochoo, Stepping Over the Junk, Lee, and Jazz.

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28 responses to “Meme-ries”

  1. hammer Avatar
    hammer

    Very entertaining. Night Ranger..cool! I’m a jeapordy master too. I never went to audition though.

    I tried to do millionaire but they kept asking Wibledon questions…sheesh

  2. Le Nightowl Avatar
    Le Nightowl

    Jocelyn,
    I have been tagged recently, not once, but twice for the same meme, and I haven’t been able to get down to it.
    I think I suffer from primal memephobia, deep down inside ๐Ÿ™‚
    I think you’re very brave, and you haven’t done the job half-heartedly.

    Your post reminded me of 2 things:

    – I once had to ask an autograph to Michel Platini, who was then in his early football (read: soccer) days. I say “had to” because I didn’t want to, but I was made to, as I was then working in a hotel where the whole team was staying. I hate football (read: soccer, but read football and any team game)

    – We have a similar TV game in France called “Questions pour un champion” and like you, answering questions was easy. Yet I could never have mustered enough confidence to go through test.
    I always enjoy my visits to your blog, even though I don’t always comment.

    Marie

  3. Lone Grey Squirrel Avatar
    Lone Grey Squirrel

    Okay, I’ve done this meme and I have seen others. I must say, I give you the award for the best 6 weird things. This is because it is really a very personalised list. I mean, many of us may have pecularities in our eating habits but only you have been kissed by Randy at 10. Great, well thought out list. Gives great insight into who you are.

  4. Stepping Over the Junk Avatar
    Stepping Over the Junk

    We need to talk!! I spent 8 summers in Buena Vista, Co, climbing 14ers and rafting the Arkansas! I know Leadville WELL!

  5. Diana Avatar
    Diana

    Good thing his name was Randy and not Petty. Parents really need to be more careful with naming their kids. Had they put Guy Noble on his birth certificate, they’d probably be living in a very nice home that he bought them instead of his living in their basement in his underwear.

  6. Glamourpuss Avatar
    Glamourpuss

    Good selection – like you, I find life pretty weird on the whole so would have no idea what to write. However, number one is more creepy than weird – Pippi Longstocking? Cute? Is Randy serving time now by any chance?

    Puss

  7. Lee Avatar
    Lee

    I keep trying to tell you people, I’m very, VERY normal!!

  8. furiousBall Avatar
    furiousBall

    You know that was Brad Gillis’ greatest era – what a coif

  9. Dave Avatar
    Dave

    Well… You are certainly not weird. I must admit however, that your Superbowl photo and your profile photo doesn’t match so… which one is really you???? ๐Ÿ™‚

  10. Steven Novak Avatar
    Steven Novak

    Night Ranger….hahahahahaha….

    The minute I saw the words Night Ranger I started laughing. ๐Ÿ˜‰

    Steve~

  11. velvet girl Avatar
    velvet girl

    Great list! What a well thought out and funny post. Genuinly Drafty… snort!

    Glad that you got to keep the placemat… after all, you were the one who had the guts to go and ask for it. ๐Ÿ˜‰

    -velvet

  12. Jazz Avatar
    Jazz

    Night Ranger? Um… ok. Maybe you could make a killing if you sold the autographs on E-bay?

  13. mist1 Avatar
    mist1

    Where is Randy now?

  14. Susan Avatar
    Susan

    Night Ranger! Odd thing, I just got back from a break before I read this where “Sister Christian” was blaring on the radio. Cue twilight zone music. Thanks for coming by and I really hope your 4 y/o isn’t going to live through night terrors. It’s neither fun nor easy–more so I imagine for parents. Thanks for coming by the blog and feel free to drop by again!

  15. Jocelyn Avatar
    Jocelyn

    Hammer–So now we know: your intellectual weakness is Wimbledon…I’m filing that away for future use.

    Nightowl–“Primal Memephobia.” Ha! You have such great turns of phrase.

    Lone Grey Squirrel–I think I spent way too much time coming up with these six things. So thanks for appreciating them.

    Stepping Over–Leadville is too gorgeous, eh? I lived in Boulder, Co. Springs, Longmont, for a few years, so Leadville became a bit of a habit (watching 4th of July fireworks there in a snowstorm was pretty dreamy).

    Diana–You are so right about the power of naming. That’s why my kids are named Biggy McBucks and Givin’ It All To Mom.

    Glamourpuss–I agree that the whole Pippi Longstocking thing bordered on creepy. And not just because my mom bent a hanger over my head.

    Lee–Hey, I would *never* imply, or state outright, that you’re weird. But this one is about weird things that have happened to you, making you a passive recipient of the weirdness…

    Furiousball–It scares me that you know the name Brad Gillis. But you are redeemed by being able to appreciate his hair.

    Dave–Hair and make-up do wonders for me.

    Steven–What’s so funny about Night Ranger?

    Velvet–That was my feeling about the placemat, too. Getters, keepers.

    Jazz–Or maybe I could make a killing selling that autograph to *you*? I sense a deep interest in Night Ranger here.

    Mist1–I’m thinking he might have grown up to become Dorky Dad. Heh.

    Susan–Radio stations still play Night Ranger? I might have to turn on the radio someday.

  16. actonbell Avatar
    actonbell

    LOL, great meme, Jocelyn! And a belated rabbit, rabbit to you!

  17. heartinsanfrancisco Avatar
    heartinsanfrancisco

    I’m sure those shows save their harder questions for auditions because if nobody knew the answers on the show, it would be too boring.

    I was just tagged for this meme, too, but I think it’s just 6 strange things about me. This one is more fun, and your answers were pretty unusual.

  18. Fresh Hell Avatar
    Fresh Hell

    I use Sister Christian as retaliatory fire when someone tries to get a son stuck in my head. That or anything from Whitesnake. Or anything from the soundtrack to The Sound of Music.

    Your list weird things makes me think that we share a lot of parallel experiences with the strangers in life.

  19. Dorky Dad Avatar
    Dorky Dad

    Mybad for being in an online coma for a few days. I missed this one.

    That said, I KNEW there was a reason why I tagged you … this was fantastic. Night Ranger??? What kind of syrup did they use?

  20. choochoo Avatar
    choochoo

    Mission accomplished *does saluting-handgesture-thingy*

  21. Diesel Avatar
    Diesel

    You can still rock in America, Jocelyn.

    I knew a guy in college who was a complete know-it-all and was always kind of a jerk to me for some reason. He was in love with a cute chick named Julia, whom I later married. A few years later he got on Jeopardy and lost. Ha!

    Congratulations, you’ve won the “one more blog that I need to waste my time on” award. I’m adding you to my blogroll.

  22. Jocelyn Avatar
    Jocelyn

    ActonBell–You have more fun with groundhogs than anyone I’ve ever met. Thanks for working my blog into your shadow-checking schedule.

    Heartsinsanfrancisco–Yes, I was thinking that must be the case–they have to save the easy questions for the real show. Yup. I like that rationale.

    Fresh Hell–I felt the same way when I visited your blog. Well, except for having a date last week and all (okay, I *did* have a date, but don’t tell my husband because he sometimes reads this blog. So if he’s reading this, “NO, NO, I didn’t have a date last week when I went out in my stilettos, reeking of Jean Nate!”

    Dorky Dad–You gave me a very fun assignment. As usual, I overthought it. Hey, I like your new Darrin/Dagwood photo. Heh-heh. Oh, and the syrup was Rockstar Raspberry, I’m sure.

    Choochoo–I’m heading over to yours now to see what you came up with. *Rubs knuckles together.*

    Diesel–That’s how I feel when I visit your blog. One day here, just after I sweep the kitchen floor, I am going to figure out how to compile a blog roll. And when I do, you’ll be on it. (you likey how I promise things I may never do?)

  23. Dan Avatar
    Dan

    You are WEIRD!

    In my junior year of college, I spent a whole lot of late-night hours playing cribbage and drinking from a keg-o-liter in the dorm room of my posse

    You are a NERD! ๐Ÿ™‚ I like how you try to introduce the keg into this to add a bit of coolness. There was no keg, was there? Admit it. There was only cribbage, right? ๐Ÿ™‚

    Just teasing!

  24. Girlie Monkey Avatar
    Girlie Monkey

    Hey Jocelyn,
    Thank you so much for stopping by and leaving a comment. I am not usually as dramatic as I was in my post today. Must be something in the air ๐Ÿ™‚
    Happy Monday,
    Girlie Monkey

  25. lushgurl Avatar
    lushgurl

    ROFLAO… I am sssooo glad you stopped by to say hi!Now I have a new Blog to stalk!!! I’d add you to my links list, but everytime I add someone ,it doesn’t work right, does THAT count as something weird? AW, I know the answer to that one- it means I am the weird one!!
    Loved your post, come back to see me soon… ๐Ÿ˜‰

  26. curiositykiller Avatar
    curiositykiller

    Ok. I love the pippy longstocking, and jeopardy things about you. They was totally unique. I’m always the one blanking out in front of the TV mumbling possible answers and do the funky chicken when I actually get one right.

    I just might have to start blogstalking you too. Ahem – I didn’t mean say that out loud.

  27. velvet girl Avatar
    velvet girl

    The kids seem on some sort of permanent probation. Thanks to mommy brain, I can never remember the things that keep them from being sent up the river, but I recall that it involves laughing on my part.

    I have a love/hate relationship with my digital SLR, too. Just not as funny.

    Great post!

    -velvet

  28. velvet girl Avatar
    velvet girl

    Oops, wrong post!

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