ode to karaoke

The room is half dark and half light, with no overhead lighting but candles on the tables and a backlit bar lending a warm glow. A disco ball casts stars along the walls and floor at the far end of the long room. The DJ sits alone, plexiglass walls separating him from anyone else.

As the place fills up, the singers begin, responding one by one to the their names being called out as though at a middle school talent show. The first one is plump and frumpy, long hair begging to be pulled into a pony tail. He sings with a high-pitched voice and I don't like it, but Liz smiles at him, liking his energy. Next up is an older man with a crooner's voice; after him another aged one, gray hair toussled, jeans baggy over his hiking shoes; he doesn't have a show tunes look but he's sure got the voice. He stirs the place up a bit, and toes are tapping by the time the if-William. H Macy-were-a-country-singer barkeep takes the mic and then takes karaoke to its heights, leaving Liz and me to puzzle over what he's doing here rather than on tour somewhere in Texas or Tennessee.

Liz gets called up next, and we are sharing a grin as she sings the song I requested for her, Skid Row's "I Remember You," which brought her a standing ovation the first time I saw her sing it. We were at a dive bar in Somerville; it was a Friday night and she had compelled a handful of friends to go to her newest karaoke find, unsuspecting as it was. To one side stretched a long bar and a narrow room around it, with space for people to sit at the bar stools but no standing room. Through a doorway opened up what must have once been a restaurant: two rows of booths beside a pool table, a set of speakers, a DJ's table, and a few mics. No food was served, and I'm not sure the room was used other than on Friday and Sunday nights, when a random array of people came for karaoke, occasionally riling up the more local crowd who frequented the bar. (In Boston parlance, it was a townie bar, and there sometimes developed a little bit of tension between the townies and the very odd array of karaoke regulars.)

That first time I went out for karaoke, the night unfolded as though it had been scripted by Christopher Guest; the unlikeliest of people are good at karaoke. An overweight, unkempt, somewhat unappealing woman of at least 40 could pull off quite the Pat Benetar. A pretty, reserved woman in office clothes could sing Van Halen's "Dreams" so movingly that the DJ slipped around the room arranging people in couples and then setting us up to slow dance. An older man, looking fragile and tired, could have been Frank Sinatra if I'd closed my eyes. Two stereotypically Boston type of guys—donning Red Sox jerseys, speaking in thick accents, looking very Irish and very burly—sang Phil Collins and Air Supply so perfectly that I may have felt a tear surface in my eye. Later one of them would sing Prince's "Kiss"—a terrifically hard song to emulate—so exactly that I would think it was a recording before turning around to see his mouth wide and the onlookers cheering.

If the characters who were singing and the completely bizarre song list they were creating were fascinating, then the DJ topped it off. She was an Angelina Jolie look-alike with black hair and jeans with a too-high waist. At one point, she lept onto the separating wall between booths and did a virtual strip tease (clothes staying on), then presented the sweetest little old lady to sing the last song of the night—a mellow 1940s tune that sounded a bit like a lullaby—only afterward announcing, "That was my mommy." As all that unfolded, I laughed and clapped and wished I'd had a video camera with me because I knew I'd never see anything quite like it again.

The highlight of the night came when my sweet, preppy friend Liz got up to the mic and belted out one of my favorite songs from my teenage years. It already felt rare enough that Liz existed—that there had been two smart, straight-laced girls at Harvard who knew every glam rock heavy metal tune, from power ballad on up; who had once plastered their bedroom walls with posters of the bands; who had read magazines like Metal Edge and Circus to learn the band members' names and predilections. I adored that music in my early teen years, and having had only two friends who were into it at the time, I marveled over finding one more who knew about Danger Danger; who didn't laugh at my liking Trixster (briefly, I promise) or Warrant; who loved to sit back and re-listen to those old Poison and Skid Row and Guns N Roses tapes that I still haven't thrown out.

It already felt rare enough that Liz and I both existed and had discovered, after knowing each other a year or two, this shared former passion. But that she could sing it—blond curls, pearls, and all—really blew my mind. You don't know how many times I've sung along to those songs in my bedroom or in my car; but I can't carry a tune and can only hit about three notes, so the prospect of singing those songs in public was not one I had considered. It was joyous to hear someone else do it.

Soon enough Liz had everyone in the room on their feet. And as she sang it again last week, I felt like they were all still there, admiring not just her voice but her presence, her absolute knowledge of how Sebastian Bach (Skid Row's lead singer) would've performed it. As the people sitting around me clapped for Liz and smiled at me, I realized what a joyful place a karaoke bar is. Everyone there loves to sing, and most of the talented ones have probably dreamed at some point of fronting a band or being a performer of some other kind. All I ever wanted to do was hit the right notes. But when you go to the right kind of place, everyone cheers for you even when you don't get the notes right. Everyone cheers for you and makes it feel ok that you gave "Every Rose Has Its Thorn" a try and failed. They don't mind. They understand your love of music. They understand your urge to sing along. They let you live out a dream a little bit, and that makes it all the better when your friend also lets you live vicariously; when your friend sings just what you would sing, just the way you wish you could sing it.