a Bad Experience

maggie

Caterina: I can’t believe I let you rope me into seeing this performance. It was so lame!

Oliver: Okay, you’re right, it was the pits. I had no idea it was going to be amateur hour. When I saw the ad in the paper describing this as an experimental play, I thought it might be interesting. Was I wrong!

Caterina: I didn’t understand that play at all. The music, if you can call it that, was atrocious. How can anyone be expected to listen to that for more than three seconds without going crazy? I wish I could get those two hours of my life back!

Oliver: Yeah, it’s left a bad taste in my mouth, too. Let’s go see something else. I want to put this whole experience behind me.

Caterina: Benjamin’s Bar is having open-mic tonight. Do you want to check it out?

Oliver: No way! Wild horses couldn’t drag me to another amateur show. How about a movie instead?

Oliver: You’d better pick one, though. Look what happened when I was left to pick a play.

Caterina: Forget about it. We’ll just chalk it up to temporary insanity.

1.Our dialogue begins with Caterina saying to Oliver, “I can’t believe I let you rope me into seeing this performance.” “To rope someone into something” means to convince someone to do something, to make them want to do something, perhaps something that they didn’t really want to do in the first place. So, Caterina is saying I can’t believe you convinced me to go to this performance.
2.“It was so lame!” “Lame” means, here, not interesting, boring; unsatisfactory, we might say. You could say, “this party is lame,” or, “this television show is lame.” It’s an expression you’ll hear among teenagers and young people; it’s not quite as common with older generations
3.Oliver said, “Okay, you’re right, it was the pits.” He’s telling Caterina that he agrees with her; he says the performance “was the pits” (pits). To say something is“the pits” means it’s very bad, it’s terrible, it’s horrible: “It was the pits.” The word “pit” has several different meanings in English; take a look at our Learning Guide for some additional explanations of that word, as well as the word “rope.”
4.Oliver says, “I had no idea it was going to be amateur hour.” “Amateur” is the opposite of “professional.” We use the expansion “amateur hour” to talk about a performance, such as a play, that is so bad it seems as though it was done by amateurs, meaning it wasn’t professional. Any sort of performance or play could be called “amateur hour”if you are criticizing it, saying it wasn’t very good. Oliver says that he saw an ad – an advertisement – in the paper describing this as an experimental play. “Experimental” is when you try something new. “To experiment” means to test something, often something that is new, so an experimental play would be a new kind of play, perhaps.
5.He says, “I thought it might be interesting. Was I wrong!” When you say “was I wrong,” you mean I was wrong; you are admitting your mistake; you are admitting your error.
6.Caterina says, “I didn’t understand the play at all. The music, if you can call it that, was atrocious.” The expression “if you can call it that” is used to describe something negatively, usually because it isn’t up to a certain standard – it isn’t good enough. So, you go to a restaurant and you order a steak and it’s very bad, it’s not a good steak, you may describe the experience to your friend later as saying, “Well, I ordered a steak, if you can call it that,” meaning it was so bad you shouldn’t even call it a steak – it doesn’t deserve the name of steak.
7.Caterina says the music is atrocious. “atrocious” means very bad, extremely bad; something that is of a very low quality; that would be atrocious. The noun “atrocity” is a horrible thing that happens, a terrible event.
8.Caterina says, “How can anyone be expected to listen to that (music) for more than three seconds without going crazy,” meaning if you listen to it for more than three seconds you will go crazy because it’s so bad.
9.She says,“I wish I could get those two hours of my life back!” When someone says “I want to get that time – that hour, that day – of my life back,” they mean it was such a terrible experience they wish they hadn’t participated in it. They wish that they could go back in time so they wouldn’t lose that time to whatever terrible experience it was. It’s just another way of emphasizing how bad this particular play was.
10.Oliver said,“Yeah, it’s left a bad taste in my mouth,too.” The expression “to leave a bad taste in someone’s mouth” means that you had a negative experience, and you continue to think about it and remember it; it continues to bother you. For example, you go to Las Vegas, the gambling capital of the United States, and you spend $500 and you lose it, you could say, “Well, that left a bad taste in my mouth about gambling” – I still remember losing that money, and I don’t want to gamble again. I never gamble, so that has never happened to me, fortunately!
11.Oliver says, “Let’s go see something else. I want to put this whole experience behind me.” Once again, that expression, “to put this whole experience behind me,” is used when you have had a very negative experience,like going to a bad play,　and you want to forget that it ever happened. You can also say to someone who you have been arguing with, “Let’s put this behind us” – let’s forget about it, let’s move on, let’s make some progress and not worry about this bad experience.
12.Caterina suggests they go to Benjamin’s Bar because they’re having open-mic night. “Open-mic”(mic) is an event, usually at a bar or a coffee shop or some other place, where the public is invited to come and perform. Perhaps play music, sing, read poetry in front of the audience. So, you don’t have to be a professional; you could just come and you put your name on a piece of paper, and they ask you to come up one person after another. I remember in the early 90s, it was very popular in Los Angeles for cafés – coffee shops – to have open- mic comedy time, so people who wanted to be comedians – who wanted to tell jokes – could come and tell jokes. Usually they were not very good. Well, at least my jokes were not very good!  
13.Oliver doesn’t want to go to open-mic; he says, “No way! Wild horses couldn’t drag me to another amateur show.” This is an old expression, “wild horses couldn’t drag (drag) me.” “To drag” means to pull something, either something very heavy or something that doesn’t want to move, to pull it and move it across a certain distance. A “wild horse” is a horse that is not trained. “Wild horses couldn’t drag me” means that even a very strong horse couldn’t pull me to do something – couldn’t get me to do something. So, “wild horses couldn’t drag me to this movie,” or “this bar,” means there is nothing that would make me go there.
14.Caterina says, “Okay, I’ll go to a movie,” because Oliver suggests going to a movie. Oliver tells her that she has to pick the movie because he did not do a very good job at picking the play.
15.Caterina says, “Forget about it (don’t worry about it). We’ll just chalk it up to temporary insanity.” “To chalk something up” is to give a reason for something, to credit something. “I’ll chalk this up to your inexperience,” meaning the reason you didn’t do well is because you don’t have enough experience: “To chalk it up.” Usually we say “to chalk it up to something.” For example: “Tam doesn’t eat meat. I chalk it up to the influence of his new girlfriend, who is a vegetarian.” Sometimes we use “chalk it up” when we don’t necessarily like what has happened; you’re not happy about Tam becoming a vegetarian, so you have to give a reason for it: you chalk up to his girlfriend. “Temporary insanity” would mean that you were temporarily crazy, behaving strange for a short amount of time. It became popular several years ago, when someone would commit a terrible crime, murder for example, for the defense attorneys – the lawyers – to say he was insane for a short amount of time, he was temporarily crazy. We would call that “temporary insanity.” Caterina is saying here that the reason Oliver didn’t pick a good play was because he had temporary insanity. I think it’s because Oliver doesn’t know anything about plays!