01.30.06
Tell me, do you want to see me do the shimmy again?
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?
Tags: andy, drag queens, gay, music, nightlife, san francisco