My Greatest Sexual Slip-Up

This week it will be ten years since I joked about female genitalia in front of 1,500 people in church.

Time sure does go by fast, doesn’t it?

For full effect, download “The Show Must Go On” by Three Dog Night, and play at maximum volume throughout the duration of this post.

When I say the word boob, I think based on the title of this post I'm falsely getting your hopes up that this will be yet another tale of when I accidentally felt up a woman in public, thus humiliating my self-esteem to an all-time low. However, when I say boobs, I don't mean lumps of fat that are used as sexual enticements in strip clubs worldwide, I means boobs as in “for the sake of everything that is holy why are you crying at this Nike commercial?”

That was my Dad. He was a boob.

I am not exaggerating when I say the man cried at Nike commercials, because he literally did. Cue Magic Johnson narration of playing hoops outside whether it was raining, or snowing, or windy, or whatever form of gut-wrenching weather God decided to throw his way, followed by an inspirational string music ensemble combined with a slow motion black and white clip of a young kid shooting a jump shot in the dark.

Cue my Dad bawling his eyes out over the outrageously silly attempt by Nike to create motivation to buy their product, and offering me condolences in a voice that raised in pitch per word followed by an undamming of the reservoirs his tear ducts were holding back.

Dad: sniff... “Whenever I see something like this…sniff, it makes me think of how you just love…sniff, this game…” sniff, sniff.

And you wonder why I haven’t fully shed a tear since 2007.

Yes, my Dad was a boob. A big one at that. A 34 Double-D, can-someone-please-get-this-man-some-testosterone-for-crying-out-loud boob. #bawlbaby #growapair #iminaglasscaseofemotion. My Dad cried more than I did when it came to Littlefoot’s mother dying in The Land Before Time. We’re talking about one of the most traumatic moments of my 6-year childhood. I was officially scarred at that point in my young life, not because a gentle brontosaurus was finally laid to rest, more so because I could not figure out why a 40-year old man was hogging the box of Kleenexes.

Flashback to boobs, which is the real reason why I’m sure many of you perverts clicked on this link in the first place.

Ten years ago I stood before an audience, an 18-year old idiot getting ready to travel to the faraway land of Virginia, with my entire family seated before me. A family comprised of crazy aunts, weird uncles, and a slew of sisters that honestly I can’t tally up an exact headcount. I stopped counting when the number of girls in my household broke double digits, true story.

As I stood there in front of the same size crowd that the Titanic took down, I poured my soul into the microphone and exposed my inner self like a freshly sheared sheep. Amidst my emotional rush I suddenly began to turn into the man that raised me, a man that I loved and a man that I hated, a man who wept more than a broken faucet, and in that moment I began to cry into the microphone.

This is usually the part where my brain began wondering what was this salty discharge coming from my eyelids. After all, big girls don’t cry, right? But at that point I stood behind a pulpit as a 6’5” giant bawling my eyes out, and turning to the audience I apologized for my behavior, for my girlish, wimpy sobs.

Me: “Sorry, I’m not trying to cry and be a big boob or anything, we already know that there are way too many big boobs in my family.”

Cue 2.5 seconds of awkward silence that seemed like an eternity as the audience braced themselves for an outlandish case of the shnigglefits. My mind went into a mental collapse. ‘Did I just talk about boobs in a church? I am so screwed. I was referencing the domination of estrogen that caused every one of my family members to break down in tears for roughly 3-5 days every single month, my Dad included. I was not poking fun at those lumps of fat that are at the precipice of sexuality. What will the people I’m talking to think about this miscommunication?’

They lost it. Every single one of them. An audience dressed in black roared like a throng of hyenas on happy gas. They laughed, they cried, they wept in each other’s armpits trying to get a hold of themselves. They bawled their eyes out in hysterics over a young man’s sexual slip up at one of the most solemn occasions they would ever witness in their entire life.

And all I could do was stand at the pulpit in a Rush Limbaugh tie and a face as red as a sunburnt ginger, embarrassed at the way I blundered up my reference to female genitalia.

Humor sure does go a long way, doesn’t it? I say that because you remember funny moments like those. You hold on to them because they can be your crutch. Humor like that can be the one thing that keeps you from claiming madness. It can be your only defense when a Father puts a loaded shotgun in his mouth and pulls the trigger. Humor is what gets you through the tough times of life. In this case, making fun of my sisters’ boobs was the only way I could stand at that pulpit and make it through the eulogy of the man who raised me.

The man lying in the casket below.

Ten years. Ten years since that joke. Ten years since those laughs. Ten years since I made a fool of myself at a pulpit using sexual innuendo.

Ten years since a great man was lost.

Damn. Time sure does go by fast.