Embarrassing Moments

Today a group of us were discussing our most embarrassing moments and/or nicknames, since I have one of each I figured I would share my embarrassment with the net and post the stories.

My most embarrassing nickname came about because of my little sister A. I was four years old when she was born and around six when she began to speak. Like most children there were words she could say with ease and words she could not pronounce for years.

One of those words was spaghetti, which always came out of her mouth as psghetti.

The word however that appeared to give her the most difficulty was my name, Darrell. No matter how hard she tried she just could not manage to pronounce my name correctly. After awhile she just gave up trying and came up with her own name for me.

Dodo.

From the first time Dodo passed her lips it stuck. Even as she grew and was finally able to pronounce my name correctly she would still call me Dodo. To this day forty some years later when I call her the first thing out of her mouth is: "Hi Dodo."

I once asked her where the nickname came from and she had no idea. I asked my mother who also had no idea. Then along came the internet and a world of useless trivia was suddenly at my fingertips. After some researching I believe that I solved the mysterious origin of the Dodo nickname.

Apparently from 1965 to 1970 there was a cartoon here in the US called Dodo: The Kid from Outer Space. When I mentioned it to my mom and showed her an episode that has been uploaded to the web she remembered me watching it all the time with my baby sister. So not being able to say Darrell she picked up Dodo from the cartoon.

DODO - THE KID FROM OUTER SPACE
"DoDo, the Kid from Outer Space,
DoDo can go, go any place,
With propellers on his heels,
Antennas on his ears,
He's the science-fiction pixie
from a strange atomic race,
DoDo, the Kid from Outer Space.
DODO!!!"

If anyone is interested they can go to ">http://www.toontracker.com and look up Dodo and other cartoons from our childhood.

One of my more embarrassing moments happened when I was in seventh grade. I was rather innocent and did not know much about the birds and the bees. Some of the boys who were supposedly more knowledgeable than I. They were talking about men and women sleeping together. Which of course in my naiveté I assumed meant sleeping together and nothing else.

Coincidently several families from the lodge my parents belonged to had spent the previous weekend at the Salton Sea which is an inland salt water lake in if I remember correctly the Mohave desert.

Anyhow the parents had separate rooms and they rented one room for all of us kids. Since the girls outnumbered the boys I ended up sleeping with two of the girls and thought nothing of it.

That is until school on Monday when all the in boys were talking about the opposite sexes sleeping together. Rarely did I find myself in discussion with this group of kids but upon hearing their topic I had to contribute my two cents.

Big mistake.

When I told them I spent the weekend sleeping with two girls they began to ask me all kinds of embarrassing questions about what happened. When all of my responses were negative and I explained that all we did was sleep you could have heard a pin drop. Than they all started laughing as they walked away.

It did not take me long to figure out where I had gone wrong. But it took several weeks for me to remove my foot from my mouth.