Karaoke!!!!

It’s not that you’re a barfly. It just happens that all of your meetings and social outings take place in bars.

You must have meetings at a bar because you’re working with the booking person at Meadowlark and she’s on shift there. Then you drink three beers with Daisy St. Patience. And talk about work, of course. Then you go home, and outside your door there is a serendipitous, raging parade of seven of your friends wobbling down the street.

They somewhat ironically went to DC-10, where crappy Nick Cannon was DJing, but they earnestly got bottle service, over and over, and they’ve drunk three bottles of vodka and your friend’s screaming on the phone, “And pitchers and pitchers of red bull! I’ve never seen so much red bull or vodka before oh, oh, I’m so drunk!” These people are basically outside your door.

You keep trying to leave the apartment and they keep calling you, saying, why aren’t you here NOW?! The Designated Driver is calling you on call waiting, pleading with you to hurry, describing the scene as “Sodom and Gomorrah.”

So when you walk out your apartment and see them across the street, they tackle you and it’s a time of real joy, everyone is picking each other up and putting each other down, and throwing each other around, and all of a sudden you’re in their car with them, with the D.D. driving too many people to Sputnik. The Really Drunk One kind of has his head in your lap, somehow, his elbow in your crotch. He has already made out with everyone tonight, including you.

Your friends are, quite seriously, the Drunkest They’ve Ever Been in Their Lives. When you barge in with them at Sputnik, everyone takes notice. The Cute Drunk One is walking in little cute zigzags. She’s just got a smile plastered to her face. There are piggie back rides. You get a contact high and start acting like them.

There just happens to be karaoke going on at Hi-Dive tonight. Serendipity.

Two of your friends get up and give the most drunken idea of karaoke you’ve ever seen. They’re singing the Toadies? If someone were to put drunken karaoke in the encyclopedia, it would be this. They’re doing air guitar, wearing a weird hat, humping each other, getting down on their knees and screaming into the mic, all slurry and blathering: “MY BLUSHING BRIDE! MY LOVER, BE MY LOVER, YEAH!”

You should be working right now. You’re missing a deadline.

But then someone signs you up for karaoke, and suddenly it becomes your mission to drink as much as humanly possible.

Then your friend, your hipsterey friend, gets up and does the most kick-ass version of “Common People” by Pulp. He’s skinny and writhing all over the stage in a silly way, kind of Eddie Argos-like, and you’re jumping up and down and screaming “SMOKE SOME FAGS AND PLAY SOME POOL! PRETEND YOU’VE NEVER BEEN TO SCHOOL!” and he’s in the crowd, grabbing peoples’ hands and bowing to people. And he’s whipping the microphone around on its cord and stumbling all over the stage, completing hilarious dork kick jumps into random positions in the air when there’s an explosion of guitar. Here’s Pulp:

Then, this next guy is humping the amp while screaming Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance With Somebody.” He’s screaming all the lyrics. If there were a karaoke king, he would win on several points: 1.) the irony of song choice combined with its obscurity and/or length of time since you heard it. 2.) Stage humping. Breaking out into hilarious dancing. 3.) Eye contact with all of the crowd: Like a tiger, he zeros in on you. He points and screams into your face, “WITH! SOME! BODY WHO LOVES ME!” and it makes you want to scream and run away. He is so good, actually, that there are very few people in front of the stage, because he is asking people to dance with him, and people are worried they might get dragged up there and humped.

After too many other people go, you and your friends get called onstage. You are the last act of the night. Except for the one that went after you, but whatever. You were nervous, but when your song comes on, Wow, there’s not even a trace of those nerves. In fact, you’re the opposite of nervous. When you hear those beginning piano chords, you jump onstage and grab the mic like a dirty mic whore, and by the time you lift the mic, throw your head back and intone: “She’s just a small town girl….Livin’ in a looone-ly worrrrld…” eight people have joined you onstage. Maybe ten. It only takes that long. Some of those people are your friends, who planned to sing the song with you. Half of them are random people who you don’t know…

It’s Journey. “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

And you have no idea what you did for those few minutes; in fact, when you’re up there it doesn’t seem like the mic is on. Halfway through, you’re convinced your mic is a dud, so you scream extra loud into it and this random dude is next to you, doing vocal improv acrobatics and you’re all equally rock gods, and then when the song ends the guy next to you speaks into the mic and it turns out it was on. Damn. And you know that some good photos are bound to surface. This is karaoke. And all good nights end in Journey.

I have a feeling some more outrageous photos from the entire night might surface here, and then there’s another blog written about the night here, so keep an eye out.