the dangers of CMA week.

as told by Cameron



CMA week is insane here in Nashville. The city gets smacked with a deluge of cowboy-hat-wearing, boot-wearing, starstruck tourists hoping to bump into their favorite singers so they can objectify them by getting photos of or with them, as though they were a mere tourist attraction.

We locals, as a whole, aren't especially fond of this early summer bedlam, so we do our best to avoid the downtown area while the hullaballoo is going on.


This past June, I had the misfortune of being scheduled to work my retail job every single day of CMA week. Because the store is within walking distance of the Fan Fair, the store was perpetually packed with people sporting the most cliche cowboy apparel you can imagine.


Well. On the third day of CMA week, I was working at the cash register. There had been a long line the entire day, and we were all pretty tense because the store was so hectic.

A teenage girl came to my register, and I, making conversation, was asking about the dress she was buying.
She told me she would be wearing the dress to that night's CMA event.

[shocker. she'd probably pair it with some tacky cowboy boots and a pink cowboy hat, and her fellow fanfriends would gush about how "Nashville" she looked.]

I asked who was playing, and she said the only person she knew of for sure was Martina McBride.


I bristled when I heard that name: she'd been in the store a few weeks prior, and as legend has it, she was quite unkind to some of my coworkers. I had a lot of malice in my heart toward that woman.

This poor girl got an earful: I made sure she was aware of how mean I thought Martina McBride was, and used some choice words in describing her.

The girl politely smiled and listened to my lengthy rant, and then handed me her credit card to pay for her dress.


The name on the card was Martina McBride.


My stomach suddenly dropped into the seat of my pants, and the noisy store became a swirling blurry vortex of doom.

I looked at the girl with an expression of terror, and she silently nodded: Martina McBride was, indeed, her mother.




I managed to stammer an apology and a "have a good day" before I fled to the employee break room, and laugh-cried about the situation for the next 15 minutes.

I had to regain my composure to tend to the rest of the CMA folks who had infested the store. None of them had to know about this encounter.


But instead, I told the story to every single customer who went through my line.

one time I made Michael W. Smith look like a thief.

Does anyone else get Michael W. Smith and Steven Curtis Chapman mixed up? Because in my brain, they're synonymous.

they're both around 50 years old.

they both got famous in the mid '80s.

they both sing similar styles of Christian music.

they've both done some acting.

they both live in Franklin, Tennessee.

and heck, they're even friends with each other.

Same person, am I right?

And for that reason, I will refer to them collectively as Michael W. Smeven Curtis Chapman.


There's just one difference: only one of them has apologized to me for appearing to shoplift.


For a year and a half, I worked at a hipster clothing store. [to protect its identity, we'll call it Turban Snout-glitters.]

One morning, I'd just opened Turban Snout-glitters, and a man walked in. He looked remarkably like Michael W. Smeven Curtis Chapman, but Turban Snout-glitters didn't seem like the type of place he would shop, so I promptly dismissed the notion.

The Michael W. Smeven Curtis Chapman lookalike shopped for quite a while before he finally walked up to my cash register to make his purchase. We politely made small talk, and I learned that he was about to head over to make a music video.

Music video?!
Hold up.
Perhaps this wasn't just a lookalike.
Was I really talking to the Michael W. Smeven Curtis Chapman?

Fortunately, Turban Snout-glitters has a policy that an ID must be shown in order to make any purchase with a credit card. And even more fortunately, Michael W. Smeven Curtis Chapman happened to pay with a credit card.

He handed me his driver's license, and sure enough, right there at the top it said "Michael Whitaker Smith".

Holy healing rain, Batman.

I got all jittery and sweaty and stumbly, and suddenly English seemed to be a foreign language to me.

Somehow, I managed to keep myself somewhat composed until he turned his back, and then any last morsel of "I-don't-care-about-famous-people" within me evaporated as I became a giddy child.

He'd about reached the door and was about to exit Turban Snout-glitters when the alarm went off.

My heart stopped.

The rendition of "Friends are Friends Forever" that had been triumphantly playing in my head suddenly vanished.

Did I seriously forget to remove a security sensor from the shirt of a multiple Grammy and Dove award winning artist?

As Michael W. Smeven Curtis Chapman turned back around to return to the now sweat-soaked, non-English-speaking, majorly-traumatized version of the friendly Turban Snout-glitters employee he'd been chatting with, I sheepishly apologized profusely for forgetting to remove a hard tag.

Michael W. Smeven Curtis Chapman must have sensed my embarrassment and sincere remorse, because as I rummaged through his bag to find the rogue tag, he conjured up some scenario that made my oversight appear to be his error.

Though I'm quite unsure of how it happened, our interaction concluded with Michael W. Smeven Curtis Chapman apologizing to me, and me forgiving him and reassuring him that it was ok.

Epilogue:

If you watch 0:30-0:36, you'll see people pulling clothing out of a shopping bag with a hot pink interior. Yes, that's the bag of clothing from Turban Snout-glitters from that fateful day.

sorry I don't have any cash.

Gas prices are ridiculous these days.

Now, I realize gas is significantly cheaper in America than in most other countries, but I still hate having to choose to buy a gallon of gas rather than a latte.

[The latte wins sometimes, much to my car's chagrin.]

I've come to find a relatively consistent way to circumvent this pricey petrol problem:
If I buy gas in a scary part of town, it costs around 10¢ cheaper per gallon.


And this is what brought me to a gas station in the heart of scariness of Nashville, Tennessee one fateful evening.



I'd lost track of time at work, and was running a bit behind to a dinner party. I had to fill up my gas tank in order to get there, so I stopped at a gas station.

No big deal, right? Wrong.

It all started when the gas pump wouldn't accept my card, so I had to go inside to pay.
Because I was in the ghetto, I double- and triple-checked that my car doors were locked.

See, it was important for my doors to be locked, because I was leaving all my belongings in my car while I ran inside to pay:
my computer, my iPhone, my coat, ...and my keys.

Yes, as I was closing the door, I realized that I was locking my keys in my car.
In the ghetto.
When I was already running late.

All I had with me was my credit card.

So I went inside to pay and call a locksmith. The plan was to pump my gas, then go back inside to wait for the locksmith.


Well. While I was pumping my gas, a strange man approached me.
He looked like a linebacker, which was intimidating, but as he was pulling on his hoodie, I noticed that he was wearing a tshirt with the Methodist church logo on it. He's a Christian, so that means he has to be harmless, right?

I watched with trepidation as this mysterious Christian man approached my locked car in the ghetto.
He explained that he always keeps a coat hanger in his car for this very purpose, and asked if I wanted his help. He wouldn't take my passive no for an answer, so he got his hanger and started trying to pick my lock.

I'll admit, I checked his body to see if I could find the outline of a gun or something. None.

A few minutes later, a 20-something-year-old Mexican guy with a mohawk came over to my car. He seemed to know a little more about breaking into cars than the Christian man did, so the Christian man assumed a new role: he was now an over-exuberant football fan encouraging his "team" (the Mexi-mohawk man) through means of enthusiastic diaphragmatic bellows.

The next few minutes were quite mysterious to me: I'll never know how he found out about this scene that was unfolding around my car, but a Mexi-friend of the Mexi-mohawk man pulled up in his souped-up yellow low rider and emerged with the proper tools for breaking into cars.


Now, I'm not trying to play into a stereotype here, but the two Mexi-men did seem to know a thing or two about breaking into cars.


But you guys. Can we please step back to take a look at the situation at hand?

I'm standing at a gas pump watching two complete strangers try to break into my car (and one very enthusiastic Christian cheering them on), and trying my best to be ok with the entire scene.

Does this seem strange to anyone else?


A few minutes later, yet another man appears. I'm not entirely certain where he came from, but I do remember one thing: he had fantastic hair. He looked to be in his mid-50s, and I still can't figure out for the life of me what he was doing in the ghetto. Men who have hair like Fabio generally hang out in different parts of town than the one I was in.

Fabio didn't know much about breaking into cars; he was mostly there for moral support. But he morally supported me, by golly. He faithfully stood next to me and watched the Mexican football team and their cheerleader break into my car.


About 45 minutes after this whole ordeal started, Mexi-mohawk man popped the lock, and the Christian man won the Super Bowl.

Hooray, right?
Well.
Simultaneously, the locksmith pulled into the gas station to open my door. When he realized that Mexi-mohawk man had just opened my car, he went completely ballistic.

Fabio fled.
Yellow low rider Mexi-man went back to his car.
Mexi-mohawk man went inside the gas station.
Christian man was nowhere to be found.

The locksmith, a wiry middle-aged middle-Eastern man, stormed over to the yellow low rider car and started cussing out the Mexi-man who was sitting behind the steering wheel.

I suddenly realized that the locksmith expected to be getting money from me, so I looked in my wallet and found three $5 bills. Even though that $15 could've bought a substantial amount of gas (or lattes), I decided the right thing to do would be to give the money to the locksmith to thank him for his time.


I timidly offered my money to the locksmith to try to rectify the Mexi-mohawk man's alleged transgression. The locksmith snatched my hard-earned five-dollar bills from my hand, ripped them into pieces, and promptly threw them in the garbage can.

Yes, the garbage can.

Idiot.


As soon as he threw away the pieces of my money, his countenance changed: he realized the error of his ways, screamed some expletives at the top of his lungs, got back in his locksmith van, and sped away. Yes, his tires squealed on the way out of the parking lot.

And the rest of us went along on our merry way.


And that, dear friends, is why I don't have any cash.

Koreans, karate, and paper airplanes.

by Anne

For some reason, I got it into my head that I wanted to go to South Korea. In case you people don't know where it is (and I didn't until about four weeks before I moved here, so I'm not judging), it's that little fleck of land to the west of Japan that everyone thinks is a rather unfortunate part of China.

Let me tell you... that and every other American assumption of Korean culture are WRONG.

Let me illustrate:

American thought: Korean students are incredibly intelligent, excel at everything they do, and are the prime example of respect.

Korean reality: Korean students come to school every day and memorize the correct responses, eat dinner, and then go to another school, where they memorize some more. They DO excel, because they are beaten when they don't, and well... the respect thing... maybe they are, but just not to me... like the other day, when they played, "Who can hit Royster Teacher with their textbook most accurately?" (They did, in fact excel at that, although, they excelled more at "Who can hit Royster Teacher with their pencil case?")

Although, I do think my favorite memory happened on Wednesday, when the students were handed a stack of review papers for their upcoming English exam.

They quickly became paper airplanes, which, of course, dissolved into a game of (you guessed it) "Who can hit Royster Teacher with their paper airplanes most accurately?"

I was proud of myself, though: based on a decade of my own preemptive paper airplane practice, I already knew which paper airplanes even had a hope of hitting me. So, when I saw that one kid knew to sacrifice size for strength, I prepared myself.

The paper airplane was the kind with the double-folded wings... and, in true American-assumption style, I determined it looked surprisingly like a jet-fighter.

I watched the kid launch it, I watched its perfect aim, I watched it sail flawlessly through the air, and then... I surprised even myself: my hand shot into the air and closed around the airplane, without me breaking eye-contact from its creator.

I felt my ninja powers finally emerging from the dormant state they had maintained for the past twenty-two years.

As I heard the paper crumple and the gasp of the (finally) impressed class, there was a pang of regret inside me. I had just crumpled one of the most beautiful paper airplanes I had ever seen... the kind I had never had the dedication to make myself.

I opened my hands and looked at it, vaguely aware of the continuing "whoops" of impressed children around me. I smoothed its perfect wings, and I couldn't help myself. I walked up to the student, who hung his head, waiting for my reprimand, but I couldn't do it.

I handed it back to him and said, "This is a good paper airplane. I've never seen one fly so straight."

The confusion that crossed his face was still there when the class president started walking around, collecting the airplanes to throw them away before their regular teacher returned to class.

That face may never be the same.

Man-Eating Beasts

by Brittney

I would assume that every person has a vivid memory of the zoo: a time within childhood that one can examine wildlife doing its business and whatnot while having the luxury to stand behind fences and not get eaten, because being eaten would probably just ruin the whole experience.

I, like many others, have a vivid memory of the zoo, one that I acquired during the early years of my childhood…

I enjoyed so much to see all of the things that happen at the zoo: the lions lounging under the sun, the flamingos folding their knees backwards, and all of the other alliterative actions that occur among the members of the animal kingdom. As this was one of my first zoo outings, I willingly agreed to enter what I now know as a death trap: the petting zoo.

The camel and the donkey both tucked safely in their shelters with a fence between them and me fascinated me and kindly kept their distance so that I neither had to touch nor smell them. For that, I was grateful. But after being in the petting zoo for a while, I had grown too confident. I had begun to do crazy things such as petting the goats and not showing fear of them. That was my first mistake. My second mistake occurred the moment I let my guard down. I had grown so incredibly comfortable with these freely roaming creatures that I no longer was paying attention to my surroundings, and that almost cost me my life.

Standing alone in the middle of the petting zoo, confident of the distance between my family and me, I began to feel the strangest of sensations on my scalp. It tickled …and smelled. As I slowly turned my head, I saw the source of the tingling: The man-eating beast of the petting zoo…the goat. A furry black and white creature had decided that my long brown hair looked like a delicious snack more than anything else and had made its way up an entire strand of hair. Its goat lips had reach the top of my head. I never even realized until I was older that my hair had been completely down its throat. Gross. It stared into my eyes mocking me with its evil scariness. I let out a scream that would have curdled blood and began wailing in the way only a small child being attacked by a monster would. The time it took for my father to reach me seemed like an eternity, and on his arrival picked me up though the goat was still attached to my head.

To this day, I refuse to enter a petting zoo due to the experience that scarred me for life. I came to this startling realization the other day: now that I have a small child, it will only be a short time until I will be required to reenter a petting zoo and explain to my own child why I will be crying.

Prosthetic Legs and Tiger Cubs.

I've never been an especially good recipient of practical jokes.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that I react pretty negatively when someone pulls a prank on me.

(My poor roommate learned this the hard way. I went completely ballistic on her a couple months ago because of a simple prank. But that's another story.)

For as long as I can remember, my parents have been heavily involved in medical missions in Haiti. Their mission work has impacted my life in a variety of ways over the years, but this was a manifestation of missions that I never would've predicted.

See, medical missions are unique in that the donations we receive can be quite--ah--unnerving.

You know, things like catheters, syringes…

And prosthetic legs.

Yes, prosthetic legs: the most threatening of all the medical supplies. The king of scariness. The archduke of gross.

For several years, we stored donations exclusively in my parents' garage. Every single day during this era, I was forced to walk dangerously close to these abominable appendages as I entered and exited my parents' house. And every single day, I got increasingly jittery as a direct result of their presence in my life.

One night, my dad had picked me up from whatever school or church activity I'd been at that day, and on the way home he made me promise that I'd have a good attitude about (as he put it) "whatever might happen." I reluctantly agreed to make that promise, but I wasn't thrilled about his secrecy surrounding this ambiguous phrase.

When we got home, I entered the house like a baby tiger ready to prey on his dinner. Though I wasn't sure quite what to expect, I wasn't about to let this vague "whatever might happen" make a fool of me.

My stint as a hungry tiger cub ended relatively quickly, as I determined that nothing was amiss in my parents' house that night.

Until I went to bed.

I walked down the long hallway that leads to my bedroom, as I'd done countless times before. As I neared the doorway, I looked into the bedroom and saw the one thing on the planet that I wanted to see less than anything else:

legs.

Two bacteria-infested, sin-laden, gag-reflex-inducing, repulsive legs were sticking out from underneath my bed.

I screamed loudly enough to have alerted the man in the moon of my fright, and my tiger-like instincts shifted quickly from "fight" to "flight". I ran like the wind down the stairs and to the opposite end of the house. I had to get far, far away from those monsters that were laying under my bed in all their disdainful glory.

And my dear sweet mother just stood there and watched, laughing hysterically as though Bill Cosby had just performed his bit about Froofie the Dog.

Could she not perceive my anguish?!

I refused to go to bed that night until my bedroom had once again become a no-prosthetics zone, a task which I didn't have the gumption to complete myself. My little brother was granted the onus of removing the legs and returning them to their humble home in the garage.

Once my room was cleared of the legs, I tentatively peered in through the doorway, hoping that these four walls would once again house a safety zone. As soon as I deemed it safe to enter, I leapt into my bed and hid underneath my magic covers.

So there you have it: that's why I have difficulty when in the presence of prostheses. To this day, anything even remotely similar to a prosthetic limb serves as an anti-me force field. Heck, even mannequins make me uneasy.

Since that time, I've moved 350 miles away from my parents' house [and the impending doom of prosthetic legs]. I won't say that the legs were what drove me away, but the newfound distance between the legs and me is most certainly an advantageous byproduct of my living in Nashville.

Crepes, Apes, and Nicole Kidman

Because Nashville, Tennessee is within reasonable driving distance from my hometown, weekend visitors have a tendency to appear at my doorstep with considerable frequency. These visitors often, it seems, have ulterior motives to visiting me: to spy on famous people who live here in Music City.

The key to being a Nashvillian is to act as though you don't care about famous people. You must act suave and say things like, "Who, Dolly Partridge? I don't think I've heard of her. … Ohhh, Parton. You said Dolly Parton. … Hrm. Sounds vaguely familiar."

I've only partially perfected this art. I can remain calm and emotionless while I'm talking to a celebrity, but the moment I walk away, I lose my cool and turn into a preteen. And then I blow up everyone's Twitter and/or Facebook feed about how I just saw, say, the mayor of Shanghai.

Who, for the record, I've never seen in Nashville. Or anywhere, for that matter.

Last summer, a small group of assorted extended family members drove down to Nashville to visit me. As we were discussing various things we could do while they were here, I suggested we get brunch at a hole-in-the-wall cafe-style crepe restaurant about fifteen minutes from my house.

Rumor has it, this restaurant is a favorite of Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban. This is information which, while entirely unverified (I'd been to this particular restaurant multiple times and never seen them), was simultaneously a selling point for my group of relatives. So we planned to trek [ok, drive] down I-65 the next morning to eat brunch at this little five-table crepe shop.

The possibility of seeing Nicole and Keith the next day proved to be more exciting than any of us were willing to admit (my family had already begun to assimilate to the too-cool-for-school Nashville mindset), but it became evident that they were on our minds. There were intermittent rumblings of words that sounded eerily like their names until we finally had no choice but to man up.

So we did what any conscientious upper-middle-class citizen would do in this situation: we devised a secret hand signal to use in the event that we should see a celebrity, particularly Nicole Kidman or Keith Urban.

Each of us contributed a piece of the signal:

• my uncle felt as though clearing your throat would alert the others that something important was happening.
• my aunt wanted to be sure we knew that this was no ordinary throat clearing, so she added a noise to the end of it that was not unlike a rooster's cock-a-doodle-doo.
• not to be outdone, my grandma added a motion following the rooster noise where you put your index finger to the tip of your nose and push up, creating a pig snout.
• I veered from the animal theme, and contributed a motion in which you point upward, and then swirl your finger around in the air a few times. (this motion also conveniently necessitated the finger coming off the nose, and hence fortunately disassembling the pig snout face.)
• at last, my mom finished off the secret hand signal by adding a dramatic point in the direction of the celebrity with your arm fully extended.

Each of these five steps was crucial: without even one of them, the others would certainly have nary a clue that a celebrity was in our midst.

By the time we arrived at the crepe restaurant, we had become very adept at performing this secret hand signal with a nonchalant debonair flair that would put Jackie Kennedy to shame.

We ordered our crepes.

No Nicole Kidman.

No Keith Urban.

We sat down and started to eat.

No Nicole Kidman.

No Keith Urban.

And then it happened.

The door opened, and I, being the only one at the table who was facing the door, locked eyes with the woman who was entering the restaurant.

Nicole Kidman.

A million thoughts began racing through my mind.

I had to alert the others that she had entered the room.

Meanwhile, all the practicing, all the planning, all the secret-hand-signal-making went out the window.

I panicked.

The only thing I could remember was that I was supposed to make two noises in order to alert the others that Nicole Kidman and I were making eye contact.

But in my state of panic, the noises sounded nothing like the throat clearing and roostering that they were meant to. No, instead, I sounded more like a blend of an asthmatic baboon and a donkey in heat.

The instant these sounds escaped my throat, my family froze and looked at me as though I was certainly about to keel over dead.

I never did get to attempt the rest of the hand signal because they realize who had induced my sudden state of panic.

Not that I could've finished it anyway.

And then Nicole Kidman and her daughter hurriedly wolfed down crepes at the table next to us. They seemed to be in a bit of a hurry to eat and leave, presumably as a result of the disturbing baboon-donkey-human who was at the next table over. So that's what they did: they promptly exited the restaurant as unexpectedly as they'd entered.

And that's the day I made ape noises at Nicole Kidman.

Two years ago, I moved from my hometown in rural east-central Indiana [read: nothing exciting occurs aside from the occasional high school basketball game, or things like the grocery store running out of milk and bread because there's a snowstorm coming.] to the buckle of the Bible Belt: Music City itself, Nashville, Tennessee.

Since moving to Nashville, I often seem to find myself in the most curious of situations. You know, the kind of things that only happen in movies.

…or on The Office, immediately followed by one of those classic Jim faces.

The absurdity of events in my everyday life, coupled with the fact that people frequently suggest that I write a book, and enhanced by my mega friend-crush on Allie Brosh, has brought me--nay, us--here today. To this blog. To this mutual point in cyberspace.

And so here we sit. Preparing our hearts and minds for a series of fireside chats, if you will. Fireside chats that have nothing to do with anything of large-scale consequence, but rather, are about the delightfully uncomfortable and strange happenstance of human condition.