Missed My Cue
During my final year at Primary School, I was in the school play, which was some skit on the French Revolution written by the headmaster.

The Lead role went to a complete twat, and I was given a more minor role, not that I was hugely disappointed, he was older and I guess it was his turn to shine.

Anyway, as term went on, he became ill and with 2 weeks to go before the performance, he took time off school. The Headmaster offered me the role as a stand-in, and I had to learn about 20 pages of lines by heart in the fortnight. He tested me 2 days before the performance and I was word perfect (in those days I took pride in the things I did and did them well... now I do them as quickly as I can to avoid any real effort being expended).

Anyway, the first of 2 performance nights arrives and the lead manages to get off his sick bed and come in to screw up the performance with his flat monotonous voice and lacklustre performance.

At the end of the night, the headmaster gets up and addresses the crowd of parents, telling them what a hard task it was to get the kids to learn all this in a short time yadda yadda yadda. He then says "And of course some people had a little extra effort to offer" and for some reason I decided this would be a good minute to stand up assumedly to accept some sort of rapturous applause..

Everyone looked at me quizzicly, my parents knew, and were proud. I realised in that split second that I looked like a prat and promptly sat down.

Now there was no laughing, or pointing of fingers at me, no-one remembered it after that moment, but for some reason for years afterwards I felt bucketloads of cringing shame for that moment.
(LunarJim, Mon 28 Nov 2005, 8:27, Reply)