The terrible tale of the cinema trip without a handkerchief

Being British, I have been embarrassed more times than I have a care to remember. It’s woven into us, this fear of the social faux pas, so much so that you see its thread throughout our comedy and literature. Imagine the film ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’ without our obsession with social discomfort; ninety percent of the comedy would simply disappear.

That’s why I felt eminently qualified to join in with this month’s WILF (Robert’s regular ‘What I Learned From…’ group writing project) over at Middle Zone Musings. In fact, the only problem I had was choosing which embarrassing thing to write about. Various memories play in the theatre of my mind like miniature Ealing comedies, but one stands out like an angry pimple.

I must have been thirteen or fourteen at the time, and at that age I was considered to be a late developer in the boyfriend department. Quite frankly, the boys at my school didn’t have a chance. They were competing against a raging crush on Indiana Jones (who still makes me go wobbly at the knees all these years later),the marvellous Doc. Emmet Brown of course and all of the books I was either reading or writing at the time. I say ‘competing’, but of course, they weren’t interested in a gangling girl who was growing faster than her body could keep up with and was a raging geek before the word entered common parlance. Perhaps it’s better to say that I simply didn’t notice them, and they weren’t interested in me.

Somehow, I still don’t quite understand how, I ended up going on a date with a boy in the year above me. There was no enthusiasm on my part whatsoever, I feel it was more an experiment being run by my close friends who were eager for me to catch up with them, and maybe a big joke on the part of his little clique. Suffice to say, I ended up at the cinema one afternoon watching ‘Dead Poet’s Society’ with a greasy teenager who was just as awkward and unenthusiastic as I.

Thank goodness the film was excellent; it helped to diffuse the sheer social agony of the situation. I cried at the end, but hurriedly dried the tears before the house lights went up, so I thought I’d got away with it.

We had to wait for his Dad to pick us up and drop me off back home, so we ended up walking around the car park for a while. I have no memory of the conversation – but not because it was bland, but more because it’s been totally obscured by my memory of the way he kept looking at me. He kept staring at my face as if I was some kind of circus freak, a curious blend of barely disguised horror and morbid fascination.

As a teenager I was tuned into this with aching intensity, but there was no way for me to check whether the biggest spot in Christendom had erupted on my face during the film. Instead I had to just get through those clammy-palmed minutes until the car arrived, only to be met with the same expression on his father’s face. I sank into the back seat and fretted all the way home.

Polite goodbyes and ‘see you at school on Monday’ chirrups were exchanged as we pulled up outside my home and I dived into the house. I went straight to the hallway mirror, and the answer was there, smeared all over my face. Bright blue streaks were plastered down my cheeks, making me look like some kind of ancient warrior whose war paint had been applied by a drunken elder, and then rained on for hours. The culprit was still crumpled in my hand; the flyer that I had used in the dark cinema to wipe away my tears in the absence of a handkerchief. No wonder father and son had looked at me that way. In the way that only a teenager can, I simply wanted to disappear, and never go back to school again.

Looking back on that afternoon, what I most obviously learned from this is to never go to the cinema without a handkerchief. I learnt it well; I never leave the house with a tissue squirreled away somewhere.

But there was a more fundamental lesson, one that I didn’t learn until many years later: if you’re with the right person, things like this will never be embarrassing. They’ll be funny, yes, you might get laughed at, yes, but only in the nicest ways. I’m still clumsy, occasionally socially awkward and even more of a geek than I am now, but the man I love really doesn’t mind when I do things like this. In fact, it’s part of the reason he loves me, and that is a million miles away from social death in a cinema car park. Thank pasties I’m not a teenager any more.

Tagged as: Doc. Emmet Brown, social embarrassment, socially awkward