Did you ever do anything in your childhood that you regretted?
If you didn’t, congratulations. But in my case, I can’t say that I made it through without embarrassing myself more than once. There was a particular rock group that was very popular when I was growing up, KISS. And they had their painted faces, Ace Frehley and Gene Simmons, and all the players in the band. Are they groups or bands now? I was corrected recently that we don’t have groups. We have bands. I guess they were the band. Anyway, I wanted to be like them. I was cool, right? My friends were really into the group, into the band, so I wanted to be like them too.
One time I took an old pair of black Sunday shoes, and Gene Simmons, I think it was Gene Simmons, had these platform shoes, they were black, and they were, I don’t know, four or five, six-inches tall. I went out in the garage and cut out the shape of the sole, and I screwed them in, and I basically made homemade platform shoes out of an old pair of Sunday shoes that I had, added a couple of two by fours on them, and I could wear them just fine. Well, guess what? I wore them to school, and what I thought was cool, everyone else thought was, “Dude, you’re dorky.”
I had to go through third period, and then I had gym class. Well, fortunately, I had gym shoes at school with my gym clothes in the locker. So the rest of the day, I could wear my gym shoes for the rest of the day. I didn’t have to go around with what I had thought would be really cool platform shoes like Gene Simmons, and instead, I could wear my regular tennis shoes. I’m sure everyone had already heard about it or seen it or whatever else.
We’re going to embarrass ourselves sometimes. Sometimes we do it as adults. You have to just get past it as I did then. Learn what you can from it, laugh about it, and move on, and that’s what I did. Hopefully, it doesn’t take you a lot of years to learn to laugh at your mistakes and the embarrassing things you do. But just some food for thought from a memory I had recently.