Butoh Dancing

Okay, so I've decided that everyone needs to hear my most-embarrassing-moment story. (rebecca if you're reading this i think you may even share this m-e-m with me!). So, when I was 16 years old I was working at Clinton Academy in East Hampton. I was sitting out front when a woman came up to me and asked me if I would like some free tickets to see a performance at Guild Hall that night. I said, 'what's the performance?' She says, 'Butoh Dancing...it's supposed to be really great!' She offers me as many tickets as I want and I take 4 tickets. (as an aspiring musician I knew that any tickets for free were such a great deal i had to have them! - little did i know...)
Well, immediately I contacted my cousin Mark. He agreed to go and we both called one friend apiece to go with us. I called my friend Rebecca, he called his friend Tommy. We were very excited - doing something kinda grown-up. So I remember dressing with care that night, preparing for my night out with my friends seeing something so exotic as butoh dancing....again, little did I know what I was in store for.
Well, we arrived at Guild Hall and handed our tickets in, which were 1st row, and since my cousin was in a wheelchair they let us sit in the back booths (thank God). Well, we got into our booth and started looking around at the audience which was anywhere from small children to elderly people but some people looked really bizarre with crazy hats, etc. and we kind of snickered at them and wondered just what we had gotten ourselves into.
The show started and immediately I was taken aback by the weird music...very modern, contemporary art music and the 'dancing' was colored lights on either side of the stage with someone dancing with veils all over her. This part of the program lasted at least a half an hour (boring)...
Then the light came on center stage and there was a tall staircase which the woman was dressed on top of draped in white veils. I looked at my friend Rebecca and say, 'Looks like a wedding'...she proceeds to roll down the staircase in a slow motion way. I mean, so slow each step took about 5 minutes. As she's rolling down the stairs her veils come off and underneath, well, she was buck naked....no joke. She continues to roll down the stairs in the clothes that God gave her and then the lights go out. (we all thought, 'Thank God that awkwardness is over!')
Lights come up, center stage, she's laying in a shallow pool on the stage. (still naked as a jaybird) facing the back of the stage so all we see is her backside....she starts doing her crazy slow motion dance in the water. Well, that's all it took for us...one of us started to snicker, the other kind of muffled a laugh and the next thing you knew, all four of us were laughing so hard we were crying. Now, mind you, there was no other sound in the theater at this point - no music, no coughing by someone with a tickle in his throat, NOTHING. So we continue to laugh - some audience members hit the wall between booths to tell us that we were waaaaay uncool, and finally we get up the courage to leave. Of course upon leaving we realized we left my poor cousin laughing in the booth, sitting in his wheelchair...had to go get him and then we left Guild Hall and laughed so hard we almost peed our pants. We walked into the village (this was before cellphones remember) and called my parents on a payphone and waited for them to pick us up.
Wasn't so bad until the next morning (Sunday) when we all went to church (we all went to the same church) and everyone seemed to know this embarrassing story and kept mentioning it to us. It took me 10 years to step foot in Guild Hall again! I have never been more embarrassed in my entire life and writing this story just made me laugh out loud, yet again, at the ridiculousness of this dance.
I have read about this dance, researched if you will - and I still find it completely ridiculous and asinine and now I have no wonder that they had to give away tickets to this completely idiotic display....and now you know my most embarrassing moment in life. Stay tuned to my next post - you never know, you may get my 2nd most embarrassing moment - lol :)