(no subject)

[which_chick]

I blew the day yesterday visiting with my cousin San and her company. I went swimming. I danced (this was more because I was the girl of last resort than an act indicative of any, y'know, romantic inclination) and got yelled at for not letting him lead. (I do not have authority issues. We'll all get along fine as long as I get to have the authority.)

I sang.

In public.

With a microphone.



Those who know me reasonably well have, by now, guessed that there was alcohol involved in the evening. Quite so. I like singing. I'm pretty good at the words and when people start and stop singing and the general speed of things and what it's supposed to sound like... but I can't hit a note five tries out of five, so I don't sing in front of people without a lot of persuasion or, as it happens, a minimal amount of persuasion and a lot of Pinot.

The singing, which mostly took place in groups, was amusing because we (humans) do not know as many of the words as we think we do. Ever. There are a lot of words that you can skip over if you're singing along to the radio but when there's NO RADIO and just a guy with a guitar, you had better have the words. It's also pretty easy to get lost when nobody really knows where the people are supposed to come back in after the break... and then you're wandering around with lyrics that had damn well better go somewhere pretty soon but you can't find where they go. V. embarrassing. To help with that, there was booze. It's a better lubricant than you might think.

In the course of the singing, I learned some songs were suitable for singing by drunk people and some songs were entirely NOT suitable for singing by drunk people. Folks who do karaoke and stuff probably already know this, but I learned it last night in a garage with a reasonably-lit guitar player, a wasted drummer, and a bunch of not-exactly-vocalists pawing through a ring binder of songs to find things we'd heard of and could mostly sing.

Songs that are not good for drunk people to sing: Stairway to Heaven, Desperado (We butchered both of those memorably enough that I took note, and I was both BEHIND the speakers and lit far enough to be singing into a microphone so that other people could hear me. If I thought we sucked, we sucked.)

Songs that are pretty good for drunk people to sing: American Pie, Friends in Low Places, the upbeat early Beatles stuff (Help, Love Me Do, Hold your Hand)

Very favorite song of the evening: Twist-and-Shout (which we shoved right into La Bamba in the middle. Since none of us knew any words to La Bamba except for the title phrase, we eventually went back to the lyrics for Twist and Shout, which was okay.)

Anyway, that's what I did with my yesterday. Despite the emphasis on being all liquored up, we will all note that I'm awake and functional before 8:00 AM on the following morn. This is because I am a responsible adult and don't quite do to myself these days what I used to do when I was younger, dumber, and rather quicker to bounce back from the less-than-tender embrace of Demon Rum.

Comments

[ornery-chick.livejournal.com]

Sounds like good times. I mostly only sing when my sister is around. For reasons I can't quite pin down, we're kind of infamous for bursting into ridiculous songs when we're together. Usually really awful things like Cream's "Mother's Lament" (if you're not familiar with it, it's about a baby getting sucked down the bathtub drain and is meant to be sung incredibly badly).

I can sing the whole of Stairway, very badly, while sober. I don't know if I could manage it while liquored up.

[cousin-sue.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the spouse did that. At a party last fall. Drunken Karaoke to Roxy Music.

He was cute when he did it, though.

As for me? I am usually the one who remembers the words...

[cassandramorgan.livejournal.com]

The restaurant I used to work at had a karaoke night. "Sweet Caroline" (Neil Diamond) was a favorite.