If you still had the paper towel, we would ask to put it in the SorryWatch Hall of Shame, if we had a Hall of Shame.

Here is my fried chicken story: at a party where, except for an Asian girl and one other biracial girl, my sister and I were the minorities we played Taboo, which is sort of charades game. At one point, we were supposed to be guessing for our team, and our clue-giver was getting frantic, because he’d said “luggage” – but couldn’t say suitcases, or Samsonite – and he’d said “gridiron”- but couldn’t say football – and we still weren’t getting it. “Fried chicken!” he screamed hoarsely. “Fried chicken!!!!” My sister and I gave each other baffled looks as the hourglass ran down. “Fried chicken?” my sister ventured. “Are you stupid?” our Idiot friend roared, a little caught up in the game. “It was O.J. SIMPSON!”

My sister and I exchanged one laden, speaking look, and collapsed in hysterical snorts and laughter. We laughed for a good ten minutes, only shrieking, “O.J. Simpson!” to start us off again. It was just too dumb a connection for us, who’d been raised vegetarian, and didn’t have the “Gosh, guess we’re black people and should eat this” thing. Also, apparently there was a Samsonite commercial – that could only be a vauge memory from very early childhood, so we just didn’t get the connection. And fried chicken simply wasn’t going to help… (unless there was an OJ Simpson friend chicken commercial we didn’t know about, we were supposed to guess that the clue was “a black man.”)

SorryWatch will be mortified to know that Idiot Friend went into a room and scrawled a full-length, hideous apology on a piece of paper towel, and then called us into the kitchen to READ it to us. It was an “If something I may have said may have offended in any way,” sort of mournful thing, and it went on and on. Mostly he was offended that we’d laughed at him, and put upon that he felt pressure to apologize, since others in our group made him aware of his blunder and told him he was racist. All we did was laugh. And laugh. And, to this day, just my sister saying “O.J. Simpson!” in this particularly urgent tone will bring out the snortylaughs all over again.