Memories of Karaoke Past

Last night, I was visited by the ghost of Karaoke Past. It was a little frightening. The spirit appeared to me with microphones wrapped around it, a high-pitched wailing rendition of "Picture" emanating from its mouth. It was then I realized in horror that I've not done a karaoke update in quite some time. This is terrible. How would you possibly know what was going on at the Chalet? I promised to rectify the situation as soon as possible and the ghost went away, to my relief.

Unfortunately, I haven't been keeping very good track of what happened when so we'll have to rely on my memory (which is not the best) and comments from Beth to fill us in on anything I might have missed.

Several weeks ago, we arrived at karaoke and were pleased to see others of our group show up shortly after us. There was a man who was sitting near our table that kept walking back and forth to the pull tabs booth. When Sara decided to pull a couple of tables together, she enlisted his help. Sara is both blonde and buxom and the man was more than pleased to assist her. He also tried to engage us in conversation.

Man: I see you've got your communion together.
DM: Do you mean our commune?
Sara: It's our...um, what's the word? The word for a group of witches?
DM: Coven?
Man: Your covenant?

It amused me that not only did he not know what the correct words were but he kept using religious terms.

A week ago Sunday, our resident celebrity (besides Bryan) Dan Lang was there (he was in Bryan's band, Medium and Beth, Angie and I all have his autograph. He thinks we're weird). He decided to sing "When I'm 64" by the Beatles which is my favorite Beatles song ever. My next favorite is "PS I love you."*

*Beth once left a comment saying that she thought I was more of an Elvis girl than a Beatles girl and that is correct. I do prefer the sultry voice of Elvis over the Beatles. However, the post I was writing about was about how I asked a group of girls why they listened to New Kids on the Block. Hadn't they ever heard of the Beatles? Their response? "They're old!" Stupid kids. So I was comparing one male group to another.

Later on in the night, the decision was to go to the wheel. This is also referred to as karaoke roulette. It's played by Bryan asking for a number from 1-100 and that decides the disc. He'll then ask for a number of 1-18 and that decides the track number. We did have the option of tapping the person out if the song was something they had never heard of before.

I don't remember all of the songs but we did manage to maneuver (ever so cleverly) Dan into singing "I Touch Myself." That was hilarious. Our clever maneuvers included whispering "Hey, let's have Dan sing (whatever the number is for the song. Beth has it memorized. I don't (I should clarify that Beth loves numbers and has a tendency to memorize all of the song numbers that she sings and most of mine. Not because she sings "I Touch Myself" on a regular basis)). That would be funny." And then we would shout out the number. Bryan, in an attempt to thwart us, would ask a random person for the track number. He chose John (semi-singing regular) this time but fortunately (for us, not so fortunately for Dan), Dan didn't know the song and was tapped out. When Bryan asked John for a new number, John conceded to peer pressure.

Dan said, right before the song title came up "Hmm. I'm not sure this is good when all of you start shouting the same number." What can we say? We are evil.

Dean was also there and he participated in the wheel. I'm not sure what song he ended up with. Beth also participated. She was less than thrilled with her song "Baby Got Back." She did a pretty good job of it but it's a song Dean usually sings and we consider it sacrilege if someone else sings it. So she was having some issues with it. "But it's Dean's song!" she said.

I ended up with "White Rabbit." It's never a song I recognize the name when it appears on the screen but you know it the minute you hear the music. It immediately conjures up images of watching the movie "Go Ask Alice" (and apparently I'm going to have to watch it again because William Shatner was in it. How do I not remember this?) and remembering reading the book. There are two scenes I remember from the movie clearly - one was Alice and her friends stoned at her brother's birthday party and her parents had no clue but her brother knew. The other was when she went to treatment and one of the patients was talking about getting stoned. What she said to that always stuck with me - "He's getting high just talking about getting high, and you're getting high off of his high, and I'm getting high off of your high. And it's one big contact high."

Anyway, apparently I did a good job with the song so my memory finally worked and helped me out with something (finally). Dean told Beth it needed to be added to my list.

Bryan decided that we were going to form a new church. His opinion was that, since there apparently is a church of vampires somewhere in Minnesota, why couldn't we form our own church? We would become the Church of the Angry Frankenstein Monsters. We had a lot of fun pretending to be Angry Frankenstein Monsters. Rhianna (regular), Troy (recent regular) and their friend (small blonde woman whose name I have not yet learned, also a regular) are also going to join our church. Troy sang a song that Bryan introduced as the most homo-erotic song ever. We had a great time laughing over the lyrics and had to agree with Bryan's theory.

Friday night, Beth and I journeyed up to Wild Tymes to see Angie. That was fun. Dean was up there as well and I was going to sing "White Rabbit" for him. Unfortunately, I do not remember things very well and gave Angie the wrong number so I had to pick another song. I did end up singing it later and I gained an audience of several attractive males who were singing along with me and told me that I rocked and also, after I finished singing, some girl came up and hugged me and thanked me for singing the song because it was her favorite song ever (I am puzzled as to why her favorite song is about drug abuse but hey, to each their own).

Sunday, we were up at the Chalet again. It was an interesting night. I was in an incredibly great mood because of the whole weight loss and hugged Andrew in my enthusiasm. We (Sara, Beth, Amy, Angie and I) gave him a great deal of crap because he was dressed up (well, for Andrew), wearing khakis and a nice blue button up shirt. If you remember, a month or so ago, I mentioned that Nate had broken up with Becky. To fill you in on the recent Chalet gossip, Nate was actually seeing someone else and ended up marrying her. To the delight of Beth, Angie, Amy, Sara and I, Andrew and Becky have started to date. Possibly. We're not sure if it's official or not but we are all pleased with this. Andrew is a great guy and we all adore him and plus, he has hair so I very much approve. After all, one of my daily affirmations that I created for Becky was that she deserved a man with hair.

Dan was there again and he, Bryan and Angie sang something by Alabama. Rocky Mountain Music? I think that's right. Nice harmony between the three of them.

And, because I am a woman and it is my job to obsess about these things - a week ago Sunday, James sat next to me (after an effective strategy employed by Beth ("James! You should sit by us so we can talk about Lost")). Now, perhaps I am reading way too much into this but if you're not interested in a woman, would you continue to leave your knee/leg pressed up against hers? And when she moved her knee because she wasn't sure if you were doing it or if she's just so desperate for your touch that she subconsciously throws herself at you, would you move your knee back so you were touching her again?

And then, this last Sunday, he didn't sit by me but, when Beth asked him what song I should sing (we had decided it was New Song Sunday again and I was rejecting all of her choices) he said I should sing "Take On Me." This is one of the songs ever. You go from a normal range to high, ear-splitting notes that I couldn't reach if I climbed a ladder. But I tried it. It was horrible. I think I did okay with the normal part but couldn't get anywhere close to the really high note.

Anyway, at the end of the night, when we were all saying goodbye, I had walked past James to stand by the door. I was not touching him, there was a gap in between us, and he moved! Moved so that he was touching me, so that his arm and shoulder was behind me and I was somewhat leaning against him. Why? Why does he do that? Is he trying to drive me insane? I think so.

Tonight is karaoke again, a return to the Chalet. I am looking forward to it.