Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2006 16:23:06 -0700 From: "Keith Fichtemaier" Subject: To Sing, or Not To Sing That is the question. At least a month before BARGE, I told Patti that the perfect song for post-wedding karaoke would be "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" and that I would be willing to do a duet with her but for two reasons: 1. Due to aging or smoking, I no longer have the vocal range I used to enjoy. 2. There's not enough alcohol in the state to get me to sing. During my Katrina vacation, our Austin hosts took me and my married couple fellow refugees to dinner across the lake. It turned out it was karaoke night, but there were only a handful of customers besides us. Nobody was singing until our hosts each sang a love song to each other. It was touching, but really bad singing. Meanwhile, we were looking through the thick book of songs trying to find the worst possible karaoke tune. The winner was "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." It's possible we could have found one better, but we were done with dinner. I have trouble imagining someone singing that at karaoke. Friday night, I ended up at the wedding/karaoke. I'm one of those people that thinks karaoke is like a car accident - you don't want to see them, but you can't look away. And alcohol just makes them messier. My first moment of dread came when I looked over and noticed Prock was intently studying the big book of songs. I'm not sure why this scared me so, but it did. After a while, I was over there next to him, looking through the book myself (but not to sing.) I thought it odd we had a Vegas wedding where we not only had no Elvis, but we had karaoke with nobody choosing an Elvis tune! C'mon people! It's Vegas! Someone should do Viva Las Vegas. So I started trying to talk people into doing an Elvis tune. Someone reminded me that Cliff has a son named Elvis, and I silently criticized him for not bringing Elvis to the wedding. I was also looking through the book for other songs I could try to get people to sing. I noticed they had a certain song that I knew would put Patti on tilt if only I could get someone to sing it. After several refusals, Asya and Sharon Goldman agreed to sing it. I went back and told Patti they were going to sing it (tilt anticipation is the best) and she claimed it wouldn't tilt her! LIAR! She must be bluffing. She said that if I put in a slip for it, she'd sing "Great Balls of Fire," which I figured might just put the rest of the room on tilt. I went to the table with the pencils and the slips of paper and filled out one for each. I carried them around for a while before deciding my tilt odds were better if I get Patti to sing. The DJ was outside having a smoke, so I gave him the slip and $20 (if I've learned one thing from Goldie, it's that if you give someone in Las Vegas $20, good things will happen) and asked if he could move it to the top. He did just that. So Patti belted out "Great Balls of Fire" and it doesn't seem to have the tilting effect I had hoped for. Oh well. I went back and started perusing the book again. I noticed it had the Celine Dion Titanic song. I asked ActionBob, who was sitting next to me, what it would take to get him to sing it. "You'd have to pay me a lot of money." I thought for a moment and asked "This large amount of money - how many digits are in the number?" He thought for a moment and answered "Not even three, I think." Well, shit, I thought, that's do-able. I went over to Nolan, who was holding court nearby, and told him I was taking a collection to pay ActionBob to sing the Titanic song and asked if he'd contribute. "I'm in. Whatever the fuck it takes. Dan's in too" he said, pointing at Dan Goldman a couple yards away. Dan looked up and said "I'm in what?" Nolan told him "You're in." OK, I thought, if I get $20 from each of them, and from me, only one other person would bring it to $80, which should be enough. Who can I get to ... Then I noticed Gavin. His response to my request of a $20 sponsorship was along the line of "Fuck yeah, I'm in." Knowing these fine gentlemen were good for the money, I went back to ActionBob and gave him $80 of my own money. He took it and gave me a slip to give to the DJ. While I was gone he had already filled it out! I went up on stage and gave the slip to the DJ. In my mind, I thought the $20 toke I had given him earlier would make this one a priority too, but that didn't seem to happen. As I came down off the stage, Chuck W asked me "So you're going to sing?" Now I know, on further reflection, that he had just seen me give a slip to the DJ and the obvious conclusion to draw from it was that I was requesting a song I could sing. This didn't occur to me. What did occur to me was that I hadn't actually looked at the slip that ActionBob had given me, and I suddenly thought that he had written MY name on it instead of his, and that he was now going around telling Chuck and anyone else that I was going to sing it and that I had just given someone $80 to r00l me and... Chuck saw a rarity - me speechless with a look of horror on my face. It lasted only seconds, though, because I figured out there hadn't been enough time for Bob to have told him. I walked back by Bob and he told me he didn't even know how the song starts. He asked me to help him with the song. I told him that it wasn't important that he do it well, the point was that he was doing it at all. Grizz was in the back with his video camera on a tripod. He had filmed the wedding and was getting the karaoke too. I told him to keep the tape rolling until Bob sang. Bob noticed me talking to Grizz and came over. He told me that taping it wasn't part of the deal. I pointed out that Grizz just recently finished putting together the BARGE '97 video, and by the time this hit the net, Bob's daughter would be in high school. After a while, Bob came up to me and said, with a pained look on his face, that he didn't think he could do it and he'd like to give the money back. He held out my $80. I told him we'd need $200. He pleaded, and I said I would have to check with my investors. I went up and sat down next to Nolan and Foldem. I told Nolan that Bob wanted to buy his way out because he didn't want to sing. Nolan said "No fucking way. He agreed to sing. Tell him not to be a pussy." Some more time went by. It was clear the DJ gave me no credit for the previous $20. ActionBob came up to me again. The look on his face was pathetic. He took out his wallet and removed a $100 bill. He held it out to me and said "I can't do this." I took the hundred. I may have told him to get out of my sight. I went around to Nolan, Dan and Gavin and gave them each their $5 profit. The seemed perfectly happy to get it, but I left karaoke thinking I left money on the table.