Embarrassing moment #2

Your daddy’s going to prison!

I’m in a spacing rehearsal for a huge show. We’ve learned the show in our rehearsal hall using tape and folding chairs to indicate walls and set pieces, and now we’re in the theater for the first time making sure everything we’ve rehearsed really fits on the stage and the actual set.

A bunch of us are sitting in the half-dark theater waiting for the kids to finish having their number spaced, when we realize one of the kids on stage is the offspring of a local jewelry store owner who’s just been caught in an all-over-the-news fraud scandal. I forget exactly what he'd been doing, but it was something along the lines of selling fake diamonds as though they were real or replacing people’s real diamonds with fake ones when they brought in their jewelry to be cleaned, reset or appraised. And now everyone is talking about it.

The jewelry store owner and his brother are already objects of ridicule in the community because of the cheesy, puerile, insultingly stupid—and completely inescapable—TV and radio spots that they run everywhere. And there have always been rumors that their employees never know when their paychecks will bounce.

So the opportunity to make fun of them by whispering things like Your daddy’s going to prison! at one of their kids from halfway across a darkened theater—knowing full well the kid can’t hear us, of course—is too much to resist. And we do it for at least 10 minutes while the kids’ number is being spaced.

And when our number is called and we get up and head to the stage, we realize the jewelry brothers have been sitting behind us the whole time.