I'll Never Tell...One Tale From The EBWW

It's a delicate situation. An extremely delicate one. What does one do when someone of more notoriety than you puts you in an awkward position and doesn't even know it? After a few days of careful consideration only one conclusion presented itself and that was to simply write about it. No names will be used in the writing of this tale. There are those that might even say that it didn't happen. But if you've been a reader of this blog over the past few years, you shouldn't be too surprised that it happened to me. Fortunately, I have a certain discretion  about me, although I have been accused of being totally uncouth in the past. (Hey, I'm an observer of things and I like to point them out.) On my recent trip to Dayton, Ohio for the Erma Bombeck Writer's Workshop, I met an amazing group of people. Some I had met before, others I had known online and still others I had become friends with through Facebook and Twitter. There were also a lot of new people that I met and I look forward to remaining in contact with as many of them as I can. Laughter was the main highlight of this year's workshop. Everywhere you went people were laughing. They were laughing in small groups. They were laughing in big groups. They were laughing so hard that they were doubled over at the waist with streaks of mascara-laced tears running down their cheeks. And then there were those that were all alone walking randomly by themselves with a smile on their face. Perhaps, they needed a minute to collect themselves--to savor the awesomeness that is the EBWW. Or perhaps, they just needed to pass gas; you have to wonder about  (and not walk behind) those that walk by themselves, you know? On one such occasion I found myself walking alone. On purpose. No, it wasn't from that quinoa-super-spiced bean salad that we had for lunch one day but from an incident that I had just witnessed. Only me. I was gathered around a table involved in a humorous conversation with other workshop goers when another party joined the group and sat across the table from me. The other party was attractively attired in a beautiful suit that fell just below the knees. As my gaze drifted from the person speaking to the one that had just sat down I was deeply startled not to find a beaming smile, but in its place, a small patch of white. I did the old double take just to make sure I was seeing what I actually thought I was seeing and indeed I was seeing it. In a word. Flashed. Now, there are two rules that I have adhered to over the years and that is to never wear a skirt and never to sit in the front row. Since I don't wear skirts I really don't have to worry about the second rule. Perhaps, this party just needed to relax and unwind for a bit before stepping back into the whirlwind of the festivities or maybe because she was with such a beautiful flock of swans and it didn't matter. I don't really know but I could have used a warning shot. Because for the rest of the afternoon, I was totally shot. What would have Erma done in that situation? Laugh it off? Point it out? Who knows? But the only thing that kept running through my mind was a piece of advice  that my mother had always told me. "Make sure you have on clean underwear, wherever you go." Woo hoo!