shut up and take my gold pressed latinum

I felt bad about it right from the jump, because I agreed that that other girl should have won. So, I guess you could say that I won, but it never really felt like it. Then, I answered the phone and I was on the radio. I heard the kid upstairs listening to the radio.Īs the DJs bantered one of them mentioned that they hoped the girl who failed her cheerleading audition would win.Īnd I heard the kid upstairs fall out of their bed. I was downstairs, fully dressed and guarding the phone like I had a make-or-break job interview. I probably would have still been in bed too- awake, but lazily snoozing and half-assedly listening to the radio program had I not been wound so tight with anticipation. The other kid that I grew up with was still upstairs in bed. I vaguely remember thinking that they had a good point, and they probably weren’t wrong, but the chances of me winning were so slim that it just wasn’t going to matter in the end.īut it turns out that the chances of me winning were 100%.įriday morning came. Here’s something – I vaguely remember one of my adults expressing some trepidation about allowing myself to be labeled “Most Unpopular” and that I might be opening myself up for even more ridicule than I was already experiencing. I don’t remember a single other kid who called into that contest. I remember thinking how awful that was for her, and that I thought she should win, but I knew it was a random drawing and really, it was out of my hands by that point. She had to give a weak “thank you” and walk off the stage with what was left of her tattered dignity. The cheer performance was rated by audience applause, and not one single person clapped for her. She was probably about my age and she described how she auditioned for her school’s cheerleading squad.

I remember hearing one other girl call in. I might always remember that, but there are entire people that have been scooped out of my memory thanks to a fever I had when I was eighteen. The earpiece was the saucer section, but the part where the neck of the ship meets the secondary hull dug into my cheek something fierce. It was shaped like the TOS Enterprise, and was a very poor ergonomic design. I described the Star Trek t-shirt I was wearing and bragged about the Star Trek phone I was blabbing into.

I explained that the reason I thought I was unpopular was because of my unrelenting love of Star Trek. I guess I thought it might have been a neat experience, and maybe the thought of hearing my voice on the radio was just too much for me to resist. I think I knew I had a very limited chance of making it through, and even after that, of making it on-air, and EVEN AFTER THAT, of winning. I think it’s fair to say that if you called a radio station one hundred times, ninety-nine of those times you would be greeted by a busy signal. A radio station always has some sort of contest going on and one million-jillion nut jobs are calling in at any given moment of the day just because they literally can’t think of anything else to do. Let me repeat this in case it isn’t quite clear-Ĭhildren called into a morning radio program that hundreds of thousands of people listened to and attempted to explain to all of those people why they thought no one liked them. What the contest would entail is kids calling in and describing how unpopular they are, and then they would be entered into a random drawing that would occur that Friday. It was something like “The Most Unpopular Kid Contest.” Remember, it was the 90s.

I guarantee you that hundreds of thousands of homes were doing the exact same thing.Īt some point during the summer, this popular morning radio program had announced that it was going to do a contest, and I’m sorry, I don’t even remember what the contest was called. It was a lazy, aimless summer, but we always, always listened to this one morning radio show. The adults responsible for my care (I don’t like using specifics) were at work and had trusted me and the other kid I grew up with (specifics) to stay home alone. I think it was 1995, and I was about twelve years old. That you have never heard a story like this before.

Shut up and take my gold pressed latinum