I Double Dog Dare You
Everybody laughs during the Movie “A Christmas Story” when Flick stuck his tongue to the frozen flagpole at school on a dare. I had something like that happen to me once and I spoke about it on the air this morning. I had a bunch of people reach out to me asking for more on my story so I figured I would write about it. So here it goes.
I was probably 13 or so and for Christmas, I asked for and received a nice pair of binoculars. After I got done doing my Sunday morning paper route, I decided to grab the binoculars and head out to my back yard. We had a railyard right in our back yard and it was guarded by a huge chain link fence. I put both elbows on the top pipe of the fence and started looking at the town up the tracks from us. At some point, I licked my lips and my bottom lip got stuck. So, to get my lip free, I licked my lip. Well, my tongue hit the pipe and that was all she wrote. I tried to pull my head back but couldn’t. I tried to bring up more saliva thinking that would set it free. Nope, that didn’t work either. I was stuck. I could hear my neighbor working on his 77 Dodge Charger and I started yelling for him. He didn’t hear me. I thought I was going to freeze to death out there because everyone in my house was sleeping. Eventually, my sister Gert got up to use the bathroom. She heard a weird noise coming from the back yard. If you hold your tongue with your fingers, you can do a great impersonation. She opened the bathroom window and asked what I was doing. I tried to say, “I’m stuck”. It sounded more like IMMM STUUUUK. She asked are you stuck? I tried to answer but it sounded like, eeepppp. So she came downstairs and came out to investigate. Laughing pretty hard, she went back inside to get water and poured it over my tongue and I was free. I lost I don’t know how many layers of skin on that fence that day. I went inside to get warm and I wrapped my tongue in gauze. I couldn’t get it to stop bleeding and I couldn’t taste anything for a few weeks.
I’m grateful that my sister heard me and came to my rescue. Trust me, her and everybody else in my family won’t let me forget it. At every family get-together at that house, someone has to bring up the time when I got stuck to the fence. They all hold their tongues with their fingers and try and talk like I did that day and for days to come.
They are all lucky I love them. Of course, that day if I said it, it would sound more like, I wuvvvv woo!