Are you blushing?

Kimberley McGee

Friday, March 3, 2000 | 9:04 a.m.

It's just a moment, a string of seconds that add up to cringing minutes.

Those minutes can seem like a lifetime when something happens to cause unforgettable embarrassment.

Most people have experienced moments they'd rather forget. A child blurts out what you have said you really think about a co-worker, while the co-worker stands with mouth agape.

Or there's a draft in your pants and the only thing to do is turn around and zip up. The embarrassment factor doubles and time creeps along as the sound of the zipper closing echoes throughout the room.

We've all had our red-faced moments. With that in mind, local residents (some of whom preferred not to use their real or complete names for obvious reasons) and notable figures (who had no choice but to use their real names) shared memories of their most memorable mishaps with the Sun:

* Alisa Santiago, 18, got her 15 minutes of fame this week when MTV came to town to tape a segment involving embarrassment.

Santiago was milling around the Hard Rock hotel-casino when the camera crew asked her to accost men using her lithe body while singing Christina Aguilera's "Genie In A Bottle."

"They paid $15 for every thrust I did against someone," Santiago said. "I walked into the elevator at the Stratosphere and opened my jacket and rubbed up against people and sang 'If you wanna be with me ...' "

If that wasn't embarrassing (although profitable) enough, Santiago had a nice, long conversation with one of MTV's employees, which she thought was off-the-cuff and private.

"He wore sunglasses in the elevator and I thought he was just acting cool," Santiago said. But there was a hitch.

"The sunglasses had a little camera in the (middle)," she said. "I thought we were just talking and I was all goofy." It was all caught on tape to be aired this month on MTV's spring vacation special.

"I looked retarded on TV," she said.

* Comedian Rita Rudner, who performs in Las Vegas regularly, had a wedding malady that waylaid the ceremony.

"At my wedding, my husband told me I shouldn't cry. And when the lady was doing the speech 'Will you or won't you ...' I started laughing uncontrollably," she said.

The justice of the peace halted the service and queried if Rudner was OK. "Then I started crying uncontrollably," Rudner said. "Then I started making moose noises."

After the courthouse wedding the new Mr. Rudner (a k a Martin Bergmen) politely asked which office granted divorces. "He's English, so he hates any form of emotion in public ... it was excruciating for him," Rudner said.

* Your mother always told you there would be days like this: Christy Cates was at work recently when it came to her attention that things weren't as they should be -- on her face. "I was waxing my eyebrows (that morning) and I got distracted," Cates said.

That distraction cost the 21-year-old some dignity as she realized the wax was still neatly applied to her forehead.

* At least her moment wasn't in front of a potential paramour, like Annmarie Fletcher's was. She had a crush on a male acquaintance --and an unwanted adornment on her schnoz.

"I had a booger on my nose and I was talking to a guy I really, really liked," Fletcher said.

A friend discreetly notified her of the offending overhang. Fletcher's fair skin showed signs of a blush, and not inspired by love. "I was just sooo embarrassed," she said. The gentleman and Fletcher still remain friends.

* Former Las Vegas Mayor Jan Laverty Jones was traveling as the city's goodwill ambassador on a trip to China.

"We were in China -- my son, daughter and my husband -- and we went to Beijing," she said.

While she was perfectly coifed with makeup, skirted suit and heels, her husband, Richard Schuetz, was dressed for a vacation.

"I was dressed, as mayor, and my husband was in shorts and a T-shirt," she said. "Every time they would announce the mayor of Las Vegas, they would introduce him. It was the culture. They are used to seeing a man, not a woman."

What really makes her cringe is a headline from 1998 that put her in a bad light. The press was goading her and she was asked why she wasn't more aggressive. She responded, "Because I'm a wimp."

"It was a front page headline, 'Mayor says she is a wimp,' " Jones said.

* An all-day drinking binge at the pool of the Hard Rock hotel-casino got Scott Georgegeff famous among friends. But not for anything good.

During a bartenders' Olympic-style competition at the pool, Georgegeff cheered his Red Square restaurant co-workers on as they zipped through obstacles with drinks on trays and were judged on infusions (mixes of various hard liquors).

"We were in the sun all day, drinking," he said. "We were drinking infusions and whatever. We got done with the contest, Red Square won, and we were whooping it up."

Unfortunatley his hat had been knocked off during the celebration. Now, this wasn't a special hat but Georgegeff was determined to retrieve it as it teetered on the edge of a fish pond by the bar where Georgegeff sat.

"I reach for the hat and my fiancee comes up behind me and says, 'Look honey, a goldfish,' and, stupid me, I asked 'Where, where?' " he said.

He fell in -- but that's not all. "The kicker is, I looked up and a hostess was filming the whole thing," he said. "I lost my hat, my glasses ..."

And it was preserved for all to enjoy. Over and over ...

* When asked to share her most memorable bad moment, comic Paula Poundstone had to ponder.

"There have been so many ... I feel that the reason the Earth spins on its axis is from some sort of energy whose source is my humiliation," the comedian said. "The world would not run if I did not get embarrassed."

She settles on this little blushing gem, which occurred while she was working in a Richmond, Va., nightclub.

"I'm not one to say it, but I had the crowd in the palm of my hand," she said. "Then someone left for the bathroom and I turned to the crowd and said let's hide before they come back."

To her surprise, they did, hiding under the tables. Poundstone had no idea where to go from there. When the guy came back from the restroom, there was silence.

"We were all under the tables, and I didn't have any way of saying to come out now, so (the audience comes) out like munchkins," she said. "I embarrassed the room. It was my one time to do that."

* Twenty-year-old Aaron D. moved to Las Vegas a year ago with few acquaintances locally. He was lonely. He called a party line and talked to some other Las Vegans who were lonely, too. He hit it off with one guy in particular and they agreed to meet at a mall.

"I had never done that before, meet a guy like that," Aaron, who had only dated girls in the past, said. They hit it off. "I had never been with a guy before, like that," Aaron said. "I was kind of nervous."

They went back to the other guy's place. They really hit it off, down to their boxer shorts. Aaron decided it was time to go home, right at the time his new friend's parents walked in the door.

They were not pleased.

"His mom walks in and starts screaming," Aaron said. "I was already nervous and then his dad comes in and starts lecturing how we'd go to hell and stuff." After much screaming and a long lecture, Aaron was allowed to go home, alone.

"He said, 'I'll call you,' and I was just glad to get out of there," Aaron said. "But he did call and we are good friends now. Just friends."

* When Nathan A. was a kid he was picked on a lot.

But he looked up to his older brothers, Shannon and Matt, and liked the stories they told him at night. However, his brother Matt fell from his good graces after a botched babysitting bit.

"Shannon went out on a date and I was left with Matt, who told me this story about a king with no clothes," Nathan said.

The fable was "The Emperor's New Clothes," about a king who naively trusts two men who say they are tailors and pretend to admire an invisible "suit," which the king wears in public.

After the story, Nathan padded off to a shower in the community bathroom in the middle of the trailer park where they lived. When he stepped out of the stall, dripping wet, something was missing.

"He took my towels, shirt, shoes, everything I had," Nathan said. "And there were a lot of girls in that park, good-looking girls."

Nathan walked home. Naked.

* Missing apparel is a common thread in embarrassing moments:

Terryl Henry, 17, was showering in the school locker room after gym class when someone took his threads. All of them. "I got out of the shower and my clothes were gone," Henry said. "I was in the gym for three periods, buck naked."

Eventually he located his clothes just outside the locker room, surrounded by a large crowd. Henry gathered his garments with as much dignity as he could. The culprits were never discovered.

* Linda Larson's vacation visit to a friend turned out to be revealing.

"We were getting dressed in the morning and we were all showering, dancing, we had the music on, getting ready," she said.

Draped in a towel -- only a towel -- Larson did not know that the roommates' boyfriend had spent the night. And he was right behind her.

"He bit me behind my ear and my towel fell," Larson said.

Although the bite was playful and didn't bruise, her ego was a little roughed up.

* Disc jockeys Mark and Mercedes and their producer, JC, from the morning radio show on KMXB 94.1-FM have a tendency to let things fly during their a.m. repartee.

"You get very comfortable and feel like you are talking to friends and you forget you are on the air," Mark said.

Mercedes' memorable moment is quickly ratted out by Mark and JC.

"She dropped the F-word on the air once," Mark said.

"They were talking about head lice and I grabbed her hair," JC said.

Mercedes quickly turned around and gave JC some advice.

"Our producer (JC) was doing something to distract me and I turned around and told him to F-off," she said.

"She forgot the mic, though," Mark said.

"We pretended it didn't happen and went on," JC said.

Mark has had a few on-air foibles with facts, or lack thereof. "When MAGIC was in town, I thought it was a magician (convention) not men's apparel," Mark said. A caller set him straight, on the air.

"He also thought a toy poodle was really a toy," Mercedes said.

"This morning show doesn't have a high combined IQ score," Mark said.

* Veteran comedian David Brenner was on the subway, reveling in the aftermath of a successful television appearance.

"I was still thinking about the night before on the 'Tonight Show' when a man seated across me looked at me, pointed his finger at me and said, 'Owww, you're funny,' " Brenner said. "I thought, great, he saw me perform the night before. I said thank you. And then not a minute later he turned to the woman seated next to me and he pointed to her and said 'Owww, you're funny.'

Brenner was red-faced.

"It turned out he said it to everyone seated in the car," Brenner said. "He was a lunatic. I was the only (a Yiddish word for "jerk") who stood up, said 'Thank you very much' and took a bow."

archive