Kyle Allen
Freshman Seminar
Monologue
One of the most embarrassing moments of my life occurred during the summer before my freshman year in college. The moment i’m referring to is when I broke one of my guitar strings at a show I played early that summer. This is a moment that I will not only remember for the rest of my life, but it also changed the way I will forever look at that show.
I still remember the day like it was yesterday. I was lucky enough to have off from school, but I still got up bright and early. I was filled with anxiety because it was my first show with the new band, that I had joined earlier in the year. Not only was it my first show with them, but it was also their first show in quite some time. I remember constantly texting the singer of my band, asking when we were getting together to practice, and what time we were going on that night. He seemed very calm and collected compared to me, which for some reason made me even more nervous. We finally met up at the drummer’s house around four o’clock that afternoon. We quickly set up out equipment, and ran through out set list for the night. After we finished practicing, we starting talking about our expectations for the night as we packed up our equipment. This was a very big show for us, because it was the first true show of the summer and a few big name Staten Island bands were playing.
After our equipment was all packed in the cars we made our way to the show. Upon arrival there was barely anyone at the venue, but this didn’t worry me because it was still early in the night. As it got closer to six thirty (our set time) we started to set up out equipment on the stage. This was always the scariest part of playing shows for me because I always wanted to make sure everything sounded right, and that our sound levels were perfect. The clock struck six thirty and we began our set. As we started our first song the room started to fill with people and all of my anxiety and nervousness went away.
We were three songs into the set and everything had went perfectly so far. As the intro to our fourth song began, my guitar started to feel strange. I got swept up in the song and completely forgot about this. Then about a minute or so into the song I went to hit a chord, and I felt and odd snap, and a weird noise came from my guitar. I prayed that I hadn’t broken a string, but as I looked at my guitar I soon learned that I had. I felt so embarrassed as I stood there unable to play along with the rest of my bandmates. Thankfully a friend of mine, also in a band quickly gave me his guitar to play, but the damage had already been done.
The rest of the show was amazing. My band got a lot of praise from our peers and we even got the chance to share the stage with a member of one of our favorite bands. Regardless of all this I will always remember the feeling of embarrassment I felt when that string on my guitar broke.
This is a picture from me at one of the last shows i played this summer. For some reason the girl that takes pictures for my bands always catches me when i have my mouth wide open.
