Wii Have the Power...to Utterly Humiliate Ourselves

With a few notable exceptions, I've never really been much of a video game player. The first time I ever saw a Wii game system, I knew next to nothing about the way the system worked.

My kids were teenagers and we had all gone to my father's house for Thanksgiving dessert with other members of our extended family. Eight or ten people were assembled in the living room while two of my kids were trying their hand at Wii baseball. I walked up behind the couch they were sitting on and that's when I noticed the little Wii characters in the bleachers of the game. There was a diverse little group representing many different skin tones, hair and eye colors, but one in particular really popped out at me. He was a little man with sunglasses, bushy blond hair and a thick mustache that drooped slightly at the sides. 

Before I could stop myself, I exclaimed, "Hey, how come that little Wii dude has a Seventies porn star mustache?"  

My kids started laughing, as did several other people in the room. It was only then that I scanned the crowd in the living room and noticed that my stepsister's* newish husband, whom I had not yet met, was glaring at me. And no wonder because had the exact same haircut and mustache as the little Wii dude.

I smiled sheepishly and quickly changed the subject--to what, I have no recollection.

My embarrassment increased exponentially in the car on the way home when my children explained that the resemblance was likely not a coincidence.  The game allows players to create custom avatars (called Miis, apparently) which then become part of the crowd when not in use. So I hadn't merely mocked a character who looked like this guy, I had mocked a character he had hand-chosen to represent himself. 

F is for Foot-in-Mouth

*Being the stickler for detail that I am, I want to mention that she actually wasn't officially my stepsister at the time of this incident. My father and her mother had been together for over ten years at that point, but they didn't get married until this past year. But "stepsister's newish husband" seemed a better construction for the purposes of this story than "my father's girlfriend's daughter's newish husband." For what it's worth, my stepsister is no longer married to Seventies Mustache Guy and since our families are sort of far-flung and not completely blended, I never had to see him again after this inauspicious beginning.