Good comedy's all about timing; and if you were at Red Arrow Park's Slice of Ice this past Friday around 2:00ish, you probably got some great comedy from the adults there skating badly. VERY badly.
Like this one woman -- she oozed cockiness as she came out of the skate rental place with her daughter (who was obviously a little pensive about skating in the first place) and her husband -- who was there with the camera ready for the photo ops. Nose in the air, she told her little one, "Let Mommy warm up first, and then we'll skate together" and took off. Only she didn't. She wobbled like a newborn calf and joked "Wow, this ice is really slippery!" with the Sideline Moms who couldn't help but look at the spectacle. They only looked at her like the fool she was. I'll give the woman credit though, she kept her brave face while stumbling awkwardly and began to glide....glide out of control, that is. That's when she came crashing down with a BANG-ker-Slide (about 4 feet, if anyone was measuring) on the ice. The beaten-down woman looked at the Sideline Moms and mumbled something like "What the heck happened?" and the moms just tried to politely ignore her as best they could. I swear, the ruckus this clumsy woman created even caused her husband and child to back away (far, far away) from this crazy-newborn-calf-nonskating person they came to the park with.
That would have been hilarious...if it hadn't been me.
Once upon a time, I had been a very graceful skater. I regularly skated at Mayfair Mall's ice skating rink, zipping round and round for hours on end. And even last year -- and the year before that -- even the year before that, I had been good! DARN good! But for some reason this past Friday, I remember stepping out onto the ice and knowing that something didn't feel quite right. I figured that the unusal slippery-ness was just me getting older (heck, I'm gonna be forty this year), but it wasn't anything I couldn't overcome, hence the trivial commentary with the Sideline Moms. Then the initial fall happened. Stubbornly refusing to believe that getting older could turn me into a wreck on the rink, I got up. Big Mistake: That's when the final SPA-LATT happened. I was ready to throw in the towel or at least use one for my backside that was by that time covered in slushy ice. Even Jamie and GG had backed away and started looking at me like I was from the Twilight Zone or something. Then thankfully...finally, some wonderful man whose name I shall never know, but to whom I'll always be grateful said "Hey! You've got your blade guards on!"
My pride hopes that your timing was off on Friday so you would have missed the five minute disaster that was me that day. But if it was on and you caught my impromptu slip-sliding-away show, I hope you got a chuckle out of it.
