Gloria Ferris

But then I remembered being young surrounded by other young people who seemed to want attention just a bit more than the rest of us.

Today when I signed on to gmail, I checked out my google page for the temperatures I keep track of throughout the country, and then, my eyes were drawn to the sidebar that suggested that I could learn how to break out the bottom of a beer bottle in four easy steps from wikihow.  Go here, if you would like to see how to achieve this “party” trick as well as these other wondeful attention getters-opening a  champagne bottle with a sword, crushing a beer can with your bare hand, oh, and the ever present, breaking boards with your bare hand.

I especially love the break the bottom of the beer bottle supplies-a kitchen sink, the beer bottle and safety goggles.I can just imagine the scene at a holiday party, first asking everyone to gather around the kitchen sink where you stand outfitted in safety goggles with beer bottle in hand.  I think I might even be tempted to use those rubber gloves at the side of the sink as well, but that is just the cautious female in me.  Is it chauvinistic of me to think that these party tricks were for the weaker sex who thinks tricks are the name of the game? 

Since the holidays are the time for memories,  I remember two such party tricks that still remain vivid in my mind and really  did not end so very well for the enactors.  The first one happened in a BGSU cafeteria where I worked during my college years.  One of my fellow workers was into karate in a big way and was always breaking dishes with his bare hands.  It was an inticrate process with just the right height, the correct number of dishes, and the chop executed oh so correctly.  The execution of this trick was always done the same way, with the same numbers, the same height, and at the same time (when the supervisor had stepped out of the kitchen for her cigarette) until that fateful night before winter break. One of the other guys suggested that  the trick was old and tired and that the karate king couldn’t break ten dishes so what was the big deal.  And so, the stage was set. 

We’ll never know whether it was the added number of dishes or the sudden appearance of our supervisor four minutes early from her break, but the blood and the cuts to the hand were immense causing a rush to the emergency room for two of us and the injured one leaving the rest of the crew  behind to explain the mess on the dishwasher’s conveyor belt.

The stars must have been aligned just so for emergency room visits that year because the second incident happened during winter break that same year.  This incident happened at the local watering hole where all of us college kids and those of us out of school with real jobs back home to visit the ‘rents would meet on a regular basis.  One of our crowd was a high school teacher whos party trick was taking a huge bite out of a “pony” glass and then chewing up the glass.  No one ever knew exactly how he did it, so the upshot was that he didn’t pay for a drink the rest of the night because everybody thought if we could tip him over the edge he would just have to tell us.

Well, this night, something went terribly wrong because he ended up with a mouthful of glass shards with grotesque amounts of blood oozing down the sides of his mouth.  It was reminiscent more of Halloween than Christmastime.  Needless to say, the bar lost money that night because we all looked at our glasses in a different way, set them down, and went home for a long winter’s nap. Lucky for him, school was out of session and by the time that he needed to report back to school, his mouth had healed to the point where it wasn’t as noticeable, but he did talk like he had a mouthful of marbles.  He never did reveal how the trick was done, and as far as I know never attempted it again.

So why am I relating all of this here and now ? Because, first of all, those parlor tricks are not very profitable in getting admiration from anyone, certainly aren’t great for getting a date, and if they do go wrong, just think how many years your friends and acquaintance will relate these bizarre twists of your fate.  Secondly, you will not benefit but your friends will get a few laughs at parties when the conversation gets around to the funniest “how to” you ever saw or maybe how quickly it can all go so, so wrong. And finally those aren’t jingle bells you hear, but the laughter of  mean little elves that cause things to go bump in the night and can turn “nice into naughty in a twinkling of an eye.

So this holiday season, learn from your elders, be yourself and let the crazy parlor tricks on the wiki page where they belong. 

This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 4:12 pm and is filed under Cleveland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.