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What are you famous for?


Whitestripe

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I guess my most proud achievement is getting a couple of mentions on TV Tropes for a fanfic I'm still failing to finish.

Other than that a colleague recently approached me out of the blue telling me she learned of the school play I had one of the main roles in due to stumbling across a newspaper article as she was researching about that play for her own students. That left me quite baffled as this article is literally the only result if you google my name after a few uploaded university projects I have been involved in got purged a while ago.

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Ooh, I'll play!

Back when I was doing stand-up comedy, I participated in a gay comedians comedy contest, in which one of the judges was Madonna's brother, Christopher Ciccone. Halfway through my set, Ciccone looked me disdainfully up and down, then got up and left the judges' area to hit the bar. So among my gay friends I am known as The Comedian What Drove Madonna's Brother to Drink.

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9 hours ago, Toth said:

I guess my most proud achievement is getting a couple of mentions on TV Tropes for a fanfic I'm still failing to finish.

Other than that a colleague recently approached me out of the blue telling me she learned of the school play I had one of the main roles in due to stumbling across a newspaper article as she was researching about that play for her own students. That left me quite baffled as this article is literally the only result if you google my name after a few uploaded university projects I have been involved in got purged a while ago.

Well at least your stint in the theatrics sounds positive, or at least neutral. The only dramatics i was ever a part of was my infant school nativity play, where, in front of the assembled parents and the rest of the school, I walked backwards off the stage, tearing down the artwork and falling in a crumpled heap (i was physically unharmed. My pride though...)

To this day, I can’t meet people i went to infant school with without them saying “Do you remember that nativity play...” 

yes, Bethany, yes I do. It is forever seared into my brain thank you very much

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58 minutes ago, HelenaExMachina said:

Well at least your stint in the theatrics sounds positive, or at least neutral. The only dramatics i was ever a part of was my infant school nativity play, where, in front of the assembled parents and the rest of the school, I walked backwards off the stage, tearing down the artwork and falling in a crumpled heap (i was physically unharmed. My pride though...)

To this day, I can’t meet people i went to infant school with without them saying “Do you remember that nativity play...” 

yes, Bethany, yes I do. It is forever seared into my brain thank you very much

Okay, that sounds absolutely terrifying!

But I must admit, my stint wasn't postive at all either. The play was amazingly ambitious in scope and could have been amazing, the Iphigenia saga merging Aulis and Tauris with a shortened Trojan War in between. But our teacher sabotaged it at every step. There were vast holes in the script saying "Improvise!" which caused me to go out of my way to write these acts myself to prevent those from looking like the jarring holes they were, but I had to fight tooth and nail to keep them in and preserve the tone of the rest of the writing unlike to the 'youth language' she wanted our characters to suddenly devolve to. Then a week before premiere the parallel course had their play, a parody of Oedipus that was an absolute blast. This caused our teacher to frantically decide that we now have to a parody as well to ride on their succes. But with the least amount of effort. All lines of our goddamn tragedy remained the same, our task was just to say them in a funny way, forcing everybody to just go ham on them. My character in particular, Orest, a classic Greek antihero who spends the majority of the story moping around and struggling with his doubts, I was supposed to play "with utter determination". Those same fucking lines, just pretending I'm Hercules! She also added a completely random and absolutely OOC romantic side plot between my character and freaking Athena for no reason whatsoever, adding it into the chapters I wrote no less and fighting with me when I begged her to remove these stupid fucking lines.

Then came our premiere. It was dreadfully embarrassing already on stage, but then the teacher chewed us out afterwards saying that no class had ever embarrassed her as much as we just did. That verdict was so devastating I disinvited my parents for the next play and struggled very, very badly whether I should call in sick myself. In the end I decided to say "fuck this" and continued playing, but only under the the self-imposed condition that I would play Orest like he was supposed to be played and ignore all the stupid romance lines she added.

I can say that I was at least very pleased with myself when parents who watched both showings told me they liked the second stint significantly better. Of course that fucking hack of a teacher then gave me a mediocre grade that lowered my grade just enough to cost me a tenth on my high school certificate. I ended up writing a parody of our play to cope with all this, that got 2700 clicks, four favos and one review.

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3 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

The only dramatics i was ever a part of was my infant school nativity play, where, in front of the assembled parents and the rest of the school, I walked backwards off the stage, tearing down the artwork and falling in a crumpled heap (i was physically unharmed. My pride though...)

When the fall is all there is, it matters.

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When I was 13 there was a competition for poetry/humor and kids voted for the best piece in each class to perform in front of the whole school.  My piece was a funny children's story about everyone eating mashed potatoes that were very hot.  The story has every member of the family blowing on the potatoes to cool them down "whoop, whoop, into the mouth, nice".  For some reason the way I said "nice" (more like niiiice) was very funny to middle schoolers.  So I got voted to perform this silly piece in front of the whole school.

And once again every time I said niiice people laughed.  Afterwards people would stop me in the hall asking me to say my niiiice catchphrase.  Teachers would ask me what the fuss was about.  Friends from other schools would say they ran into someone from my school and mentioned me, and the response was "Oh yeah, we know him.  Niiiiice."

The fame was short lived, and I found it annoying before it was over.  But in retrospect, at least it was something relatively positive people remembered me for.  

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I'm not famous. But in high school I did become kinda famous for something...

My school had an exchange program with a Polish school. The first year we went to Poland, and the following year the Polish kids came to France.
So they arrived (by bus), and the following evening we had a big reception inside my school with the consul of Poland making a nice little speech, with a toast and everything.
After the speech we were all supposed to move to the dining hall (for dinner, obviously). But with two Polish girls we felt more thirsty than hungry (it didn't hurt that they were rather hot). You see, the toast was done with some nice champagne or sparkling white wine (I could never tell the difference between a bad champagne and a good white tbh), but most of the bottles were far from empty.
Out of the goodness of our hearts we decided it was our duty not to let all that booze go to waste.
And so we finished. Every. Single. One.
I can't remember how many bottles there were. Half a dozen at the very least, but possibly up to a dozen (though some were almost empty). I remember thinking we were drinking the equivalent of about two bottles each before losing count.
And then we went to the dining hall.
By the time we arrived a few things had happened:
- The consul had left (thankfully).
- Everyone had sat down for dinner and our seats were conspicuously empty (so that our arrival could not go unnoticed).
- We were so drunk that we could barely walk.
In fact, my memories stop after arriving at my table. But I remember arriving there, completely wasted, barely standing up, with my two girl-friends, in front of 60+ other kids, at least half-a-dozen teachers, quite a few parents, and possibly a few officials.
And then walking home with my correspondant (a giant of a girl, over 2m tall), three or four hours later.
I forgot everything in-between, though I vaguely remember giving shit to my ex, and people telling me to stop shouting so much.
The weird thing is that I never got in trouble for it. My mom mentioned it at some point (one of my teachers must have told her about it), but only in passing.
It's as if it never happened (for the adults at least).
My guess is that the teachers felt responsible (they should have been watching us), and possibly my mom as well (since she wasn't there).

So that was the one time I got publicly wasted at school.
The kicker? I was 14 (kind of a wunderkind). So that was the night when the nerdiest, most awkward kid at school spent his evening flirting and drinking with two hot 16 year-old Polish girls, to everyone's surprise.
I still chuckle about it.
 

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In 2005 I wrote a letter to the editor of my local newspaper, at the time I lived in Reno, NV about Prez Bush wanting to privatize Social Security.  I didn’t like the idea and said so.   

The paper put their LTE,s online and the AFL/CIO (big labor union) called me from Washington D.C. and talked to me about it and asked if they sent a reporter out if I would agree to be interviewed and I said yes.
 
So that was how I came to be interviewed on the CBS Evening news in February’05.  
 

I thought it was a blast and the 2 folks they sent loved it when the lady from Nevada said about Bush’s plan “I know a gamble when I see it!”  A line that they kept in. 

Many people remarked to me that they saw me on the news so that was fun. Who knew my little LTE would get me on TV. 

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Years ago I was with my dog at the park.  At some point a man with a camera approached and gave me a business card that said he was a photographer from the daily newspaper.  He said he had been taking pictures and would I mind if he submitted one for the paper.  I said sure and he took my name and my dog's name and left.  A few days later sure enough there we were in the newspaper in a section on Fall imagery.  For about a month or so after that my dog would be recognized periodically at the park.  A short but sweet brush with fame.

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