One of the most embarrassing moments of my life happened in an art gallery. I was wandering around a crowded exhibition when something unimaginable happened. A painting on the wall across the room caught my eye, and, captivated, I began walking towards it to get a closer look.

My foot knocked something and I didn’t have time to look down before I heard a dreadful splintering, smashing, crashing sound at my feet. The obnoxious noise echoed off the white gallery walls. I looked down to see that a sculpture made of several delicate hand-blown glass bowls was a sculpture no more. I had annihilated it with my giant clown feet.

After the last glass shard fell, the room turned dead silent. There was only the sound of me swallowing hard. My body froze, and my incriminating foot remained lodged in the shattered mess. Thirty sets of eyes fixed on my burning cheeks, waiting for me to … what? Pull a tube of superglue from my back pocket? I concentrated all of my energy into spontaneously combusting into flames. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Instead, I moonwalked out of the mess and out of the gallery, and then I shuffled off to find a dark hiding place.

I found the gallery curator so that I could confess my crime. “Don’t worry,” he said, “It happens all the time.”

in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

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