Kim Wetter

How (not?) to Heckle

It’s not surprising to say that I’m a competitive person. It’s obvious if you’ve ever played a drinking game against me or attended a sporting event with me. I am loud and proud and kind of a dick. My uber Christian ex boyfriend wouldn’t even play games with me at one point and I can’t say I blame him. I wouldn’t want to lose to me either! Let’s take a look at three times I really pissed some people off!

How old are you guys?

Way, way back in the day, I had graduated Whitman College but was still dating a girl who hadn’t graduated yet. She sucks but that’s not the important part of the story. She was on the college soccer team (gaaaaaay) and they had a game in Tacoma so I grabbed two friends and we drove down to watch some soccer.

It should be noted here that I love soccer. I played when I was younger but only on recreational teams. Soccer was not a sport I was good at, therefore I never would have challenged myself to win. Our team was proudly the losing-est team in the league. One time our French coach split us up into two teams for practice and he called us Team Sluts and Team Prudes. Needless to say, we didn’t take the game very seriously.

I have since just become a fan. I was actually at a Sounders game earlier in the week that week. I really enjoy sitting in the supporters section, as they sing and dance and drink with joy throughout the game. It’s right up my alley. I had a lot of the Emerald City Supporter songs memorized and I thought it would be fitting to cheer on Whitman’s women’s soccer team with some Sounders songs. I started off with something fun and light that day:

We came to drink, we came to sing whoa whoa
We came to drink, we came to sing whoa whoa
We came to drink, we came to sing, ECS from one thirteen!
Whoa, ooohhh, oohh

Burn destroy wreck and kill whoa, whoa
Burn destroy wreck and kill whoa, whoa
Burn destroy wreck and kill, Seattle Sounders surely will!
Whoa, ooohhh, oohh

Emerald City we are here, whoa whoa
Emerald City we are here, whoa whoa
Emerald City we are here, supporting Sounders drinking beer!
Whoa, ooohhh, oohh

For the record, it was a Saturday morning and I wasn’t actually drinking but that’s neither here nor there. It’s a great song! Anyways, we were down by a goal so my friends and I decided we had to keep cheering louder. We switched it up to this song:

Take ‘em all, Take ‘em all,
Put ‘em up against a wall and shoot ‘em,
Short n tall, watch ‘em fall,
Come on boys, take ‘em all

That song was evidently just too much for the parents sitting in the bleachers, even in 2008. From across the stands, a mom stomps over and goes, “How old are you guys?”

I couldn’t really think of an appropriate way to answer that question, so I said, “I don’t know. Like, 5?”

She did not take kindly to that response. She yelled at me, “Those are our kids out there. That’s somebody’s kid!” Then she stormed off to sit as far away as possible.

Clearly she is not a Sounders fan…

I’m going to take that bottle and shove it right up your ass

If you think that first situation would have taught me to tone down my heckling at college games, you’d be wrong. I’m all about getting that W. My friend Forge was on the Whitman College women’s basketball team (gaaaaay) and had a game over at Evergreen College. I grabbed another two friends and headed out there for the event. It was a nail biter of a game – neck and neck until the very end.

Like most basketball games that are that close, the last several minutes were all about free throws. Evergreen was up and needed to miss a few free throws in order to push the game into overtime. We had purchased a few bottles of Coke that were now empty, so any time a girl from the opposing team would step up to the line to shoot her free throw, I’d bang the bottle as hard as I could against the bleachers. My goal was simple: create noise and distract her concentration.

My two guy friends joined in to help out. The three of us were banging away and were overjoyed when Whitman tied it up to go into overtime. We kept up the banging any time the other team had to shoot a free throw. I mean, why would we stop now? It was clearly working.

Well, some father (? or drunk uncle maybe?) gets up from his seat across the stands and starts charging over towards us. I could tell that he looked from me (lesbian, large), to my friend Pat (straight man, medium), and then to my friend Braxton (gay man, small) and decided Braxton was his only likely target. He goes, “If you don’t knock that off, I’m going to take that bottle and shove it right up your ass.”

I doubt Pat and I have ever moved so quickly. We both jumped up on our feet and yelled, “Excuse you!” Luckily the guy had just immediately turned around and walked away. I had never been so angry. Fuck that guy. I banged my bottle even harder on the next free throw.

Are you a part of the show?

For those of you that don’t know, I did improv comedy for the better part of 7 years of my life (Here’s an actual review of a show I was in). I was in Chicago for work in 2016 and decided to take myself out to Second City, aka the birthplace of SNL. Since I was going by myself, I bought a nicer ticket near the front. Near the end of the show, they did this bit where they ask an audience member to give a performer access to their phone. As I was in Chicago and was alone, so I offered up mine. I unlocked the screen for him and he took my phone to the stage to start flipping through it.

Now, having done improv, I knew that this was just a bit – he wasn’t actually going to do anything on my phone. He would say things like:
“Wow, this James guy has been texting a lot tonight. Sounds like you don’t want to hang out with him. Can I text him that?”
“We have a mutual friend on Facebook. I hate her husband. I should probably write that on her wall.”

I would just yell back, “Sure man, do whatever you want!” and I would banter back and forth with him. I knew he wasn’t actually going to do anything. After a while, I could tell he was getting a frustrated that nothing seemed to phase me.

Finally, he opened the “Notes” app and saw that I had a list of blog post ideas. He started reading them aloud to the audience.

“You have ‘How to Heckle’ on here. Well, I can say first hand you don’t need any practice there!”

The audience laughed and the bit was over.

After the show, I went to the Second City bar to grab a drink. I had several people come up to me and ask if I was part of the show. They thought Second City had planted me in the audience.

Nope.

I just really like to heckle.