Have you ever gotten a tickle in your throat and gone into a coughing fit before it goes away? Even when you drink water or try to regulate your breathing, it seems to only stop torturing you when it’s good and ready. Your friends hover around you asking if you are ok and you nod and gasp as you become more embarrassed by this little fit your body is having. You try a drink of water and it seems to sooth it, but only for seconds. It never really does the trick. Only a good four to five minutes of spazzing out generally ends this chaos.
Imagine you are sitting in the front row of Naked Girls Reading. This would be the inaugural Naked Girls Reading event in our wonderfully creative city of Seattle. Michelle L’amour, it’s founder, has flown in from Chicago and is part of the cast on stage. Michelle and the other Naked Girls - Polly Wood, Heidi Von Haught, and Jesse Bell Jones are so lovely, poised, relaxed, and confident. We are now in the third act. Heidi is reading a passage from ‘Howl’. This is probably the most important reading of the night, because tonight’s theme is banned books. Not being much of a literary fool, I haven’t even heard of it. I am savoring every word of this poem that simply blows my mind for about 1000 reasons.
…and then I feel it. A horrible tickle in the right side of my throat. I am in the middle of a really yucky cold that has attacked my throat, lungs, sinuses, and left me constantly fatigued. So this tickle is not going down without a fight. My best defense would be coughing it out. This is NOT an option! The room is totally silent as the controversial obscene tales of Howl flow from Heidi’s mouth. I fight to suppress this coughing fit. If I breathe too deeply I will cough. If I close my mouth, I can’t breathe because my nose is stuffed up. I fight and fight and fight. The tears are running down my cheeks. Snot is flowing out my nose and I was probably drooling. For anyone who has experienced CS Gas training…that’s pretty much what I looked like. Should I leave the theater? Even though I am in the front, I am on the end. I could sneak away. Yeah right. The room has hardwood floors and I am wearing very solid heels. If I move even one inch from my seat the whole audience and Miss Heidi will become distracted and the magic of her reading will be gone. Luckily my table mate had a bottle of water. I tapped her on the shoulder and motioned to it with desperate eyes. The water helped, but only a little. Luckily when this began, Heidi was 2/3 finished with her reading. I have no idea what she read during that last part, but I am sure it was amazing. As the applause roared, I coughed my little heart out and breathed long gasps of relief that I didn’t ruin the show. Only my table mate really knowing what happened…
Not so fast! As we mingled with and loved the readers at the end of the evening, Miss Jesse Bell Jones complimented me for being such a trooper. She had seen the entire fiasco go down from her poise on the stage! Well, I can only hope I built up some good points with future audiences of my own.
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Hahahah omg that's hilarious and AWFUL! At least Miss Jones was understanding - I bet she'll remember you in the future, and now you'll have that "remember me, I had the throat fit" to break the ice :)
ReplyDeleteThis past autumn I was at a wedding, and since my bf was a groomsman and his sister was out of town, my date was the sis' boyfriend. We're both Jewish, sitting in a VERY conservative Catholic wedding when they ask us to all stand and stretch out our right arms to pray over the bride and groom. For the life of me it looked like we were all hailing Hitler, and with one look to my fellow HEBretheren I accidentally went into a hysterical giggle fit. That type that is involuntary and cuts out your breathing so all you can do is make snorting gasping noises for the whole congregation to hear. And it's a Latin wedding and you have a stiletto fetish so you're the snerking very visible non-hailing Jew that's about 6 inches taller than everyone else.