02.03.06

Me. Karaoke. Video. You know you want to see!

Posted in music, gay, karaoke, introspective, josh, american idol, drag, drag queens, jenny, karen carpenter, king of clubs, mountain view, simon cowell, the carpenters, wilson phillips at 10:39 pm by admin

Last night I went with Jenny and Josh to King of Clubs in Mountain View for the first time to enjoy a lively night of karaoke. I’ve never actually been able to get anyone to go to a karaoke bar with me, because all of my friends back on the east coast were a little bit too… polished… to be caught dead in one of those places.

Thankfully, out here, it seems that people are a little more shameless. Case in point: a lovely anonymous drag queen that decided to wow us with her rendition of Superstar, by the Carpenters. Can you see her uncanny resemblance to Karen Carpenter?

Of course, it would not be fair for me to embarrass some poor drag queen on my blog if I didn’t take a little bit of time to embarrass myself. Josh sang Maybe This Time, by the lovely Liza Minnelli, but I was warned by Josh that if I were to place the video on my blog, he would never speak to me again. Hardly seems worth the risk.

So now, for your uncomfortable viewing pleasure, here is my karaoke performance of Hold On, by Wilson Phillips. This is a lovely motivational song, but for some reason the karaoke video features Jesus and the crucifix and the Virgin Mary. If there is some sort of religious undercurrent in what I thought to be a secular pop song, I would love to hear more about it. Anyway, feel free to leave your best Simon Cowell American Idol comments on my blog. Here we go!

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01.30.06

Tell me, do you want to see me do the shimmy again?

Posted in music, gay, andy, miscellaneous stuff, drag queens, nightlife, san francisco at 8:41 am by admin

One of my favorite bar trends is the ever-so-tasty Internet jukebox, which allows bar patrons to choose songs from pre-selected tracks, or download tracks from a library of 140,000 songs. This obviously can be a blessing or a curse because it makes the musical experience at the bar completely hit or miss. There are certain expectations that gay men have when it comes to nightlife and its accompanying soundtrack. Classics like Vogue and It’s Raining Men fall into the acceptable category, but the freedom that the Internet jukebox introduces to the evening means that at some point the evening is likely to be interrupted with Enya or Barry Manilow.

On Saturday evening, my friend Andy and I took a trip to a local San Francisco bar, where I dropped $10 in the jukebox (with my debit card, naturally) and proceeded to manipulate the evening’s music. I’m used to having to wait for over an hour for my songs to come up, but that particular evening I was incredibly lucky, since I was barely through one cocktail when my first song came up.

The highlight of the evening was when Private Dancer played (Andy’s choice) and a lovely overweight drag queen straight out of a John Waters film, with bushels of chest hair overflowing from her natural cleavage, proceeded to perform a stunning lip sync routine to the song. A gaggle of queens sauntered into the bar mouthing the words and quietly singing to themselves and Andy looked at them with a sparkle of self-satisfaction in his eyes, feeling personally responsible for creating this moment of magic.

Because I’m a control freak, the opportunity to force everyone else to endure my selections of Cyndi Lauper, Erasure and the Pet Shop Boys almost guaranteed that I would stay at the bar long enough to hear all 14 songs that my $10 bought. The only thing more intoxicating than my vodka and lime on the rocks was the thrill of controlling the bar’s playlist. It’s obvious that in the wrong hands, the jukebox could easily send an evening into chaos. One moment we could be dancing to Madonna, and the next moment we could be deafened by the shrill, banshee-like moans of Yoko Ono.

This, however, is the risk we take for having the opportunity to play DJ, if only for a night. How else can you get that special feeling that can only come from seeing an overweight middle-aged man in a blonde wig tapping his hairy, happy feet to your song of choice? Who says the American dream is dead?

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