Skeeter is a gentleman and a scholar: mild-mannered, thoughtful, soft-spoken, polite. Not a man prone to locker-room humor or even harsh language. So how he ended up with tickets to see infamously profane comedienne Margaret Cho is anybody's guess. She was in town recently touring with what she herself calls her raunchiest show ever. And there was Skeeter, cringing nonstop in the second row.
But as he tells it, his discomfiture was nothing compared to that of the sign-language interpreter. It wasn't enough that this unassuming young woman was witnessing the show in full view of the rest of the audience; she was assigned to repeat Cho's jokes, with feeling, for others. The routine started out with a graphic story about someone's colon and went downhill from there. Cho didn't let her off the hook either; during sexually explicit anecdotes, she would turn to the interpreter and ask, "Is there a sign for that? Could you teach it to me?" So the interpreter had to demonstrate before thousands that she knew all this X-rated stuff. And despite her blush, apparently she never failed to keep up.
What's the most embarrassing thing you've ever had to do at work? I once had to climb a ladder while wearing a skirt to string some computer cables in a dropped ceiling, with store patrons peering blatantly upward as they passed. Fortunately the long, loose folds of material allowed me to maintain some dignity. I've also appeared on the pages of the award-winning TH&W in a swimming suit, thankful to water's blurring effects for covering a multitude of sins. But I think I had it easy compared to that poor interpreter.