Dennis's Most Embarrassing Moment

In honor of our 45th anniversary on September 3rd, I give you Dennis's Most Embarrassing Moment.

First, you must come with us to our teeny-tiny Smurf-sized apartment in Married Students' Housing at Truman State University.  We had the corner unit: living room, kitchen, bedroom and bath.  The whole apartment would comfortably fit into a two-car garage with room for a patio and cute front yard to spare, neither of which we had.

It was furnished, in a way.  There was a small sofa bed, an arm chair, a kitchen table so small it could hold a Monopoly board but not the money, two kitchen chairs, a dresser and a bed, and a box we used for a nightstand.  The double bed filled the room almost wall to wall.  To get in and out you had to scoot sideways between the bed and the wall. The bedroom had no overhead light but we had one lamp with a broken switch whose cord we plugged in and out of the wall to turn it off and on and it sat on the box.  They didn't have RVs back then but if they had they would have been considered luxury apartments compared to #3 Fair Apartments.

You can see why I sat in the floor and cried the first time I saw it when my mom, my sister and I drove to Kirksville, Missouri to check it out  the week before our wedding.  I really, really cried when I was sweeping up and found the clippings from a man's toenails on the floor in the bedroom.  My mom said "At least you know the people who lived here before you had clean feet."  Thanks, Mom, that helped a lot.

Young love conquers all, though, and we moved in and started college, Dennis's senior year and my freshman. It was blissful. We settled into "Married People" routine.

Back in the olden days,---some of you may find this totally unbelievable but it is true---colleges had mens' and womens' dorms and the women had a curfew after which the doors were locked and the dorm mother had to be awakened to let a girl in if her roommates had not loosened a window screen so she could sneak in.  There were penalties for missing curfew, like having to go three days without washing your hair or having to shave your legs in public or something. (I don't know! I never lived in a dorm. I got married too young) At any rate, about fifteen minutes before dorm hours there was a great gathering in front of the womens' dorm like the swallows returning to Capistrano, with couples billing and cooing and pledging their undying love until tomorrow night or their eight a.m. classes whichever they woke up for first.

Our bedroom window faced the girls dorm with The Green, like a wide lawn, between us.  People also seemed to spend an inordinate amount of time walking up and down the sidewalk outside our window just before curfew and had I known anything about walk-up windows I could have made a tidy sum of money selling breath freshener and/or lip gloss to them.

The evening in question Dennis and I had already gone to bed, being old married people and not having to try to stay awake to keep dorm hours, but because of the gathering outside our window we were not yet asleep, in fact had not yet unplugged our lamp. The interior decorators who had furnished our lovely apartment had failed to see the need for anything frou-frou like curtains in the bedroom but we did have window shades, the pull down kind on a spring which never seemed to pull quite to the level you wanted, always either too long or too short.

We were lying in bed and I noticed that the shade was about three inches above the windowsill.  Had someone squatted down they could have peered in since the windowsill was right at the level of the bed, about knee height. In fact, I could see people's knees as they walked by. This would not do!  Ever gallant, my new husband took charge, scooting sideways down the wall to the end of the bed, then sideways up the other side of the bed to reach the window.

Now, how should I put this delicately? Umm...His night attire was, shall I say?...non-existant. (The term "naked as a jay-bird" comes to mind, but I don't know what a jay-bird is) He reached for the window shade.  He grasped it in his hand.  He almost had it.  SPROING!!!  The window shade flew up, spinning itself around and around the dowels and springs at the top and Dennis was highlighted in the window for all to see.  They even quit kissing each other to have a better view.

He stood there for a moment, stunned. He tried to scoot back down the length of the bed to a point where he could move. He scooted, then twisted, then scooted. The more he  scooted, the more he was stuck, and the more he twisted, the better the show for his impromptu audience.  I dove across the bed, knocking over the lamp, desperately trying to find the cord to unplug it, and finally plunged the room into darkness.  There was a moment of silence, then thunderous applause. The Embarrassing Moment of the Century was born for Dennis.