I think I have finally recovered from embarrassment enough to tell this story (well just about anyway. Cringe)
In January a friend asked me if I wanted to learn how to fly a trapeze. It was a free event and the trapeze was set up bang smack in the middle of the city of Melbourne.
I wasn't nervous, not one bit, after all the week before I flew a helicopter, so what was there to be nervous about. Nothing, of course ... only my body thought differently.
So I got there and I am in over-excited chat mode, talking and laughing with all the other people doing the workshop (including one 7-year-old girl).
So the trapeze instructors are telling us we have to climb to the top of this huge swaying-in-the-breeze ladder, grab the swing then launch ourselves into the air, get our legs up onto the bar and hang upside down by our knees, then fall on the safety net. Everybody else seems to be able to do this fine, particularly the seven-year-old, who is a star.
But when I get up to the top of the ladder, I am completely frozen. The instructor at the top has to wipe my legs from underneath me to even get me to leave the platform, then the instructor at the bottom is yelling at me to do things.
Swing! I shake my head.
Get your legs up! I shake my head.
Fall on the net! I shake my head.
Herewith, an unfortunate impasse, where my body refuses to do anything and even refuses to fall on the net. So there I am just hanging, unmoving, my hands in a bar death-grip..
There were no claps from the crowd either. You see the worst thing was that it was Australia Day and there was a big parade in the city, so I had a crowd of people watching me (and also meant I did my ditsiness to the tune of Advance Australia Fair delivered by bagpipes)Labels: ditsy event of the day |
