“Audience Participation”

This episode of Tell Us Something was recorded in front of a live audience on June 22nd, 2016, at The Wilma in Missoula, MT. 9 storytellers shared their story based on the theme “Bad Advice”.

Today’s podcast comes to us anonymously from audience members, who had the opportunity to shared their stories on the “Bad Advice” theme anonymously. Marc Moss & Lauren Ciampa read the stories as they randomly pulled the submissions from a bag. Thank you for listening.

Transcript : Audience Participation

First one. These are anonymous “Bad Advice” stories that you submitted.

Marc: I called in a bomb scared to hide the fact I was late for school again my friend gave me bad advice.

Lauren: Alright. The worst advice I ever received just so happens to be conventional cliché wisdom on love. To marry someone who gives you butterflies in your stomach. What this common advice fails to realize or mention is that sometimes these people give us butterflies, these people who may even be soulmates are not necessarily the same people we are meant to spend the rest of our lives with. Sometimes these people are meantto come into our lives for very specific reason, to teach us something about ourselves or to challenge or better us in some way. But when it comes to marriage, and the rest of your days, I’d say finding someone who, with whom you share a deep friendship, uncanny communication, and calm understanding is a more fulfilling route. Someone is a more…. Someone who brings you an incredibly sensing, sense of lasting peace rather than a relatively fleeting feeling of joy.

Marc: By the way, this is my friend, Lauren Ciampa everybody.  Hope I said your name right. Close? Okay.

Bad Advice: I was once dared to moon another party bus while on a brewery tour down the Bitteroot. The party bus turned out…[laughter] …the party bus, in quotation marks, turned out to be a bus of fifth graders on a Saturday adventure. Unfortunately the chaperone at the kids bus didn’t find it as funny as my friends did.

One month later in court, [laughter] the judge forgave me of my sin and asked if I was indeed an astronomy teacher as he suspected.

Lauren: Once when I was 7, 55 years ago, my oldest sister passed through the kitchen with a glass of vinegar on the way to the bathroom. I asked what the vinegar was for. She said it was for her hair.

“Do you drink it?” I asked.

“Sure,” she said.

“Can I have some for my hair?” I asked.

“Have all you want! I can get more.”

So I drink the glass of vinegar. Today I am bald.

Marc: What’s wrong with bald?

It was my first year teaching high school English and was every teacher’s favorite time of year: homecoming. I was put in charge of supervising the sidewalk decorating team while they drew huge victory murals in the parking lot. With sidewalk chalk.It was a long time to stand around with teenagers getting pumped up for the big game.

After they have drawn on much of the sidewalk, and part of the parking lot, one of the more artistic, seemingly upstanding seniors asked if they could draw on the side of the brick school wall.

I said, “No”, automatically.

But then he said very politely, “It will show our school spirit and it is going to rain this weekend anyway.”

In my first years teachers brain, it made sense! So they did!

A while later my principal wondered by, wandered by and asked “Who let them draw on the wall?”

The look of disappointment on his face when I fessed up is forever etched in my brain. Don’t trust teenagers!

Lauren: When we were five and eight, my sister and I overheard our dad tell our mom, “Someone should scoop up the shit in our yard from the neighbor’s dog and put it in their mailbox!”

Well, we filled the neighbors box with said shit.

They watched us do it and told our parents, who laughed, then made us scrub it out.

[laughter]

Marc: Bad advice. I told my younger roommate that peanut butter was a hidden gem as far as sexual lube goes.

[aside] Oh, it gets better.

Next day I went to make my usual PB&J sandwich, I noticed that my extra crunchy peanut butter was significantly more empty.

[laughter. groans]

Lauren: My friend and hiking partner advised us that we didn’t need a map to find Stanley Hot Springs because he had been there before.

[aside] This is familiar.

It was February and had only been there in the summer. Still, four of us follow him into the wilderness.

Five hours late, with snow up to our upper thighs and one hypothermia member later, we camp on the trail.

The next morning we slowly hiked out without finding without finding the hot springs.

Marc: Okay last one.

Bad advice: Everything that comes out of my best friends mouth. Example die your hair purple.

I think that’s good advice!