Today we went ‘announcing’ at the sororities.
Sororities are set up like this: They get together every monday and have dinner, and after dinner people come by and make announcements.
That’s not all there is to setting up a sorority of course. If you and like, 4 of your friends have dinner and then let people stop by for announcements it doesn’t qualify you as a sorority, you have to have dues and breast enlargements. (just kidding, that was good natured, promise).
So, what happens (I think, I don’t know) is that fraternities come by and invite houses to their parties, introduce their pledge classes and that sort of thing, it’s mostly an excuse to check out 150 members of the opposite sex with 150 of your reasonably priced friends.
Well, what we here @CMB do is we take this opportunity to introduce ourselves and promote whatever show we might have coming up. It also increases the amount of face time we get, per girl in the house. If you are a frat, and you announce, for 5 minutes, and you can look at a face every 10 seconds, then you get looked at roughly… Oh wait. This is going to be hard.
So.. {scribbling on a piece of paper} Each girl looks at 30 faces, if it’s random you have a 1 in 5 chance at being looked at, times 150 girls. {furrows brow} but there’s a chance that every girl looks away from you, and it’s not ..crap. I hate probabilities. Can someone help me out here?
At any rate, if you’re one of five, each girl runs out of faces after guy #5, so (in theory) she goes back to the beginning, so you really get a minute of face time, per girl. It’s an increase. However if one of your friends is unusually attractive, you just get ignored more.
Back to announcing.
Well, for reasons above and beyond my control we were carrying around a yorkshire terrier
the entire time. His name is Pup, and yes, I’m aware that that is a stiflingly bland name for a dog. Well, every house we walked in there’d be a few minutes of screaming (Whether they do this for all people or announcing or just bands, I never discovered) followed by a few minutes of collective “awwwww”-ing when they saw Pup. The puppy. Seriously, it was almost as if they’d rehearsed it. If there was a court stenographer it’d’ve looked like this.
“WOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww”
“WOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww”
Anyway.
Announcing shows gets to be pretty repetitive after a while (“Hi we’re the blah blah blah come see our blah blah blah it’s a pajama party blah blah blah”), so naturally I try to spice things up. (not so much because I’m interesting as much as because I am easily bored). At one house I offered dating Q&A, of course no one took us up on it because they were expecting an announcement, and not a workshop, but I gave them advice anyway, which was golden* regardless of what Greg would have you believe.
Anyway, not realizing that the dog response pendulum swings both ways, at one particular house I ran into the closest I’ve ever come to flat out public speaking disaster. I really wish someone had been filming.
I walk in the house, and start to speak but get interrupted by…
“WOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww”
which I’d totally forgotten about. So then, inspired, I hold up the dog.
“Hi. You all need to come see our show. Because if you don’t..” (dramatic pause)
“We’re going to euthanize this dog.”
Have you ever heard the sound of one hundred and fifty girls sharply inhaling in horror?
Correction. One hundred and forty nine girls. One of the girls had the presence of mind to screech “OH MY GOD!” in absolute for-real terror.
Meanwhile, the girls are in stunned silence and I can’t speak at all because…well because I can’t breathe, because I am still laughing. Hard.
Not even like “I can make noise-ha ha ha” laughter, but “Oh wow my stomach hurts I can’t breathe or see anything and did one of those girls scream out ‘oh my god’? thats got to be the funniest thing I’ve ever heard of” laughter.
I turn to Chris and Jules to see if one of them can salvage things, but they are absolutely useless because they’re laughing too.
Okay, this is where it gets worse. For about three and a half minutes NOTHING happens except the following:
A) Girls look at us in silent horror.
B) Chris, Jules and I laugh so hard we can’t make noise, eye contact, or amends.
C) I carry the dog who is oblivious to everything.
Finally Chris mumbles something about the show but it was too late because we were no longer The Chris McCarty Band, we were The Chris McCarty Dog Killers. While Chris tried to fill in the “WE WILL KILL THIS DOG” vacuum with “Come to our show, we’re fun!” I stood off to the side ‘playing’ with the dog (who I can’t call Pup, out of decency) trying to show that I’m really a nice guy with no intention of killing the dog, but I don’t think they bought it.
*”Don’t fall for the ‘Let me show you my CD’ collection trick. They’re just going to show you awkward drunken barely consensual sex.”