In the summer of ’77 I was 13 yrs old, I hung out with my cousins mostly, and we spent most of our time at the beach.
One nice warm breezy day, this girl, also my age, came to meet up with us, just returning from a week’s vacation with her family. While away, she bought some new clothes and came to model some of it for us… She was a beautiful girl, it’s true, but I really wasn’t into her myself (for obvious reasons I now know). She was wearing a bikini top with a pair of very flowy pants, the type that tied up at the waist and left the side of the legs all opened-up and then tied up again at the ankles, they looked fucking ridiculous. I turned to my cousin Mario and said: “She looks like a topless dancer”. We both laughed as 13 yrs old would at the mention of topless dancers…
Fortunately she didn’t overhear me but knew by the laughter that I had said something disparaging. She inquired but my cousin didn’t repeat.
That evening after dinner, I was back at my cousin’s place and his phone rang. He answered, listened a bit, tried to put in a word and then suddenly, started to tell the person to calm down repeatedly and then hung-up.
(loosely translated from the original French instance)
Me: What the?
Him: Someone told her what you said earlier
Me: Huh?
Him: Topless dancer
Me: Oh!
Him: She has her dad’s hunting rifle and she wants to shoot you
Me: Ah-huh…
Him: You really should talk to her and say you’re sorry
Me: Oh-eeeh-ahh
After a few minutes, I decided I should maybe call her back and tell her I didn’t mean it. When I got her on the phone, she was screaming at the top of her lungs, so insulted.
Her: You called me a topless dancer!!!
Me: Huh… no, that’s not what I said, you didn’t hear properly
Her: That’s what “Andre” said
Me: Well, he might think you look like one himself, but that’s not what I said…
Her: I have my dad’s gun and you better not be going out tonight
Me: What I said was that you looked like a Thomas Dancer, they’re the ones who keep their clothes on when they dance, I didn’t say Topless. Obviously he misunderstood what I said.
And believe it or not, that did the trick.
I was way too stubborn to apologize, I did think she looked like a Topless Dancer, but you see we were a bunch of French speaking kids using some English in our language not really understanding what we were saying sometimes, so coming up with the “Thomas” definition, although totally bogus and unexisting, couldn’t really be disputed at the time because, it was just one of those things she couldn’t really verify… But I often wondered if she ever asked her dad if he ever had gone to see Thomas Dancers…
