karaoke last night was an absolute blast.
whenever i’d done karaoke before, it was in a big bar with lots of people and cigarette smoke and drunk frat boys and motorcyle sluts and whatnot.
what a difference a private room makes.
maybe i’m just not up to speed on the arcana of karaoke, but i didn’t realize that there were rooms you can go to and have the machine all to yourselves. we ended up at a place on 32nd street in koreatown called “grammy”. 3rd floor walk-up. as kirk said, nothing like karaoke in a firetrap.
there were eight of us, plus the occasional hangers-on we ended up attracting, and they gave you a private room with the video karaoke machine and two mikes and lots of beer and comfy couches and a sturdy table to dance on.
and complimentary appetizers–fruit with pretzel stick skewers. odd but good.
the floors were iffy. when we all started pogoing i thought that the room would achieve harmonic convergence, or whatever it is called when some magic frequency of rhythm causes a building to collapse.
i can’t sing all that well, but i have attitude and volume and i know to surprise people with antics because they think i’m quiet and sweet and a little shy. my favorite song i sang was “anarchy in the uk” by the sex pistols. kirk said i sounded really good, and he is not one to blithely praise anyone just for the hell of it, so his saying that really meant a lot to me, because he wouldn’t have said it or anything else for that matter if it wasn’t true.
and they actually had hedwig songs on the machine so he sang “wig in a box” and “wicked little town.” really quite weird to see them listed, but it’s great that they were. and of course he sounded amazing as always. not as amazing as i’ve heard him on other occasions–the mike kept cutting in and out and we’d had a lot of beer–but it’s always a treat to hear him sing. he used to sing in the brooklyn apartment but he doesn’t sing now that we are in manhattan…too many people around, he says.
and we sang the obligatory karaoke songs–“born to run”, “copacabana”, “summer nights”, and all.
highly highly recommended if you want a great evening out with friends.