The Sour Cream Incident

The Tryping My Best Moment of the Week #1

Welcome to the first episode…edition…of the Tryping My Best Moment of the Week, your weekly look into some of the moments where I tried my best but didn’t quite make it. Thank you, deeply, for being here. 

As I was putting together a list of moments to recount, I did realize that most of them involve falling down in some way. Sometimes I forget how my limbs work. Sometimes I am not paying attention to where I am going. Sometimes my uncoordinated body wins out over all my other senses. Sometimes I have had a few drinks and all bets are off. My life is the opening of the Dick Van Dyke Show on repeat. Both versions. 

Hey, I don’t fall over every time I vaguely move. Just most times. But not for this week’s Tryping My Best Moment of the Week. So, without further ado…

The Sour Cream Incident 
It’s 2001 in Cheney, Washington. My first year of high school. Oh, she’s running with the big dogs now! It was a day or two from the opening of the play…I wanna say the play was called Captain Fantastic but…time is a flat circle and I have no idea if that timeline is correct. I was the only freshman to get cast in the fall play and I was feeling like hot. stuff. (I don’t think I was the only freshman who ended up performing in the play but definitely the only one to get cast. [Cassi, if that’s wrong…SHH.]) 

We’re deep into tech week, a process that, in high school, is nearly as long as the actual run of the play. At the theatre late every night, then trying to get homework done after that while also hoping to get enough sleep to appear some semblance of awake the next day. I am…not succeeding at keeping it together. 

It’s one of those late, messy nights and I come home - very heavy stage makeup dripping, fuzzy brain directing the bare minimum bodily functions, a very loud animal sound coming from my gut - and I think I’ll tame the stomach beast and make something simple and quick to eat. Get a tortilla, melt some cheese on it, add sour cream, ingest as quickly as possible. 

The first two steps go off without a hitch. Good job, theatre zombie high school freshman Samantha. Then we get to the sour cream. I open the fridge and scan all the places it would usually be. I’m not seeing it. So I look a little harder. Still no sign. I move stuff around kind of frantically. I refuse to eat my melted cheese without a gallon of sour cream, gosh durnit! (I’m a child, so no swearing from me yet.) Finally, I’m searching so hard and am so panicked I sink to the floor and start sobbing in the dim yellow glow of the open refrigerator. 

Not long into my exhaustion-fueled breakdown, my Mom happens upon me. 

“Sweetie…what’s wrong?”

“I can’t [gasp] find the [gasp] sour cream!! [sob sob sob]”

“You mean this sour cream?” She reaches over my head, grabs the container that is very obviously where it normally is, in front of basically every other item in the fridge, and hands it to me. 

With sour cream in hand, I either went completely silent or cried harder than I ever had in my 14 years of life or a combination of both. Who’s to say really? But I had my sour cream and I ingested my cheese crisp and two days later I played a great waitress in the CHS Drama Fall 2001 production of Captain Fantastic! (That’s most probably the play. I am almost sure.)

Honestly, the Sour Cream Incident is a pretty small moment but I remember it vividly to this day. It has become lore in my immediate family. It’s a kind of code. One only needs to say “I had a Sour Cream Incident” and everyone knows what that means. It means, “Something small tipped me off and I started crying about everything in my whole damn life.” 

So, here’s to sobbing in front of the fridge when you need to and always having the necessary toppings for your melted cheese vessel. 

Until next week, keep on tryping your best.