Skip to main content

TIFU by Taking My Niece to a Musical

Not recent, but a couple years ago and it haunts me to this day. I (M23) was living with my sister who has a daughter. She was about 8 at the time and we have a relatively close relationship and share a love for musical theater.

Well, my good friend happened to have a leading role in his university's production of American Idiot. Perfect, a chance for my niece and me to bond. Obviously, I tried to see if the musical was appropriate. The only reviews I could find on the matter said things like "I took my 12 year old son and it was fine." Cool, my niece is notoriously mature with the family joke being she's 8 going on 30. I did know about the swearing in the songs and told the parents. They said it was fine as their daughter had already been exposed to the f bomb.

So the day comes and we are super excited. I buy her a churro and we settle in for some quality time together.

It was not appropriate. Not remotely.

Forget the swearing (f bombs were expected, just not in nearly every line). Many scenes were highly sexual and drug use is very explicit. At one point a character ODs and my niece turned to me asking "what happened". 'Uhhhh he got sick and almost died". Somehow that felt like a better explanation.

But what is worse: She. Freaking. Loved. It.

She would not stop talking about it and for weeks listened almost exclusively to the Musical Album. Anytime we were in the car, "can you play Boulevard of Broken Dreams? Can you play American Idiot?" She would blare it in the house.

One time, her grandmother came to visit and my niece played the album. The image of her grandmother yelping as f bombs started dropping left and right is seered into my brain.

Another time, I'm driving her to gymnastics practice and we meet her gym friend at the gas station. My niece asks if I can drive both of them. We get the okay from her friend's mom and we're on our way. As we are buckling up, my niece asks me to play American Idiot.

"I don't know if that would be appropriate"

My niece replies "oh it'll be fine." She then turns to her friend and my 8 year old niece goes "you've heard fuck before right?"

Well, she has now at least.

Her parents never brought it up but I am still so embarrassed. I'm officially the bad influence uncle.

TL;DR: I accidently took my niece to a wholly inappropriate musical for her age and got to deal with the embarrassment for months after.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TIFU by forgetting my purse and attempting to get fuel

Not the craziest story but hey. I'm obligated to say this was a few months ago but I cringe every time I go past the petrol station . My petrol was getting low, not dangerously so but it said 27 miles left, (oftentimes it then suddenly drops to about 16 for example, and then 5 and then 0 very fast) I didnt have my purse on me as I just didn't need it... Picked my daughter up from school and then went on to collect my 2 stepdaughters from across town and then set off for home. En route the gauge went to 7 and then suddenly it was 1 so I stopped at the petrol station near our house. The petrol was on 0 as i pulled up to the pump and that's when I realised I had no money. I left the kids in the car at the pump and went in to talk to the cashier, it wasn't mega busy but there was a queue, I'd heard that they can help you if you can't pay for fuel. Like keeping something of yours as security. It was an elderly man and he basically refused to help. At this point i...
Post a Comment
Read more

TIFU - Don’t do what I did

On Sunday morning Aug. 24th, I awoke to discover a large blind spot in my right eye, which turned out to be what is called wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD). It has resulted in a very significant, permanent loss of vision in that eye. Although I maintain good peripheral vision, whatever I focus on at best is very blurry, and mostly disappears. I can barely make out the large E at the top of the eye chart. If this happens to my left eye I’ll be unable to read or drive. It turns out that I missed the opportunity that I had to prevent this from becoming a serious problem because I failed to report what appeared to be minor changes in my vision. In the weeks prior to August I had noticed that what I knew to be straight lines appeared to my right eye to have a little waviness. I also noticed that the color of my front lawn, which I could see through the window from my recliner,  was subdued, looked almost gray, in my right eye. So I scheduled an eye exam, which revealed the p...
Post a Comment
Read more

TIFU by getting suspended for 2 days by my front office in school.

I (13M) am an African American student at Jeannette junior high who had got suspended for 2 days here. I was in math class minding my business until my teacher had told me to go to the main office, which posed no problem to me. As i went down there, the people of the front office had stopped me and made me get a new ID (yes, we have id's.) so i had asked them if i could maybe do a different alternative and call my mother to let her bring the Id here, even then, the Id isn't that important. So, although i was talking to them in a calm manner and not showing any signs of rebellion, they had threatened to call the police on me without thinking twice before calling my parents. This is where i started getting angry, and even then now the black peers agree that could have been a racially motivated action. They then told me to sit in the office conference room because of that, leading into more anger. They had then called my mother who had came over to the school didn't even let ...
Post a Comment
Read more