Ten Years in an Empty Orchestra Pit: A Relatively Sympathetic Observer's Guide to Karaoke--Pt. II
© DJL
Third, although most people assume that karaoke is limited to rowdy campus bars and seedy cocktail lounges, the venues can actually be quite diverse. I have even seen karaoke performed at a shoe store in Las Vegas. I have no idea how anyone arrived at the notion of linking footwear and amateur crooning. Maybe it was somebody's business school project. ("Dude, I've got it--a karaoke shoe store!" "Awesome, dude! Pass the ganja.") In this case, anyone wishing to participate was handed a microphone and told to sing whichever song came up next. It was karaoke as Russian roulette, with the painful consequence that many singers were stumped when the music started and they realized that they had never before heard their selection. More than a few would escape, after a halting and unsuccessful attempt to improvise a melody, back into the soothing anonymity of the shopping mall. Amazingly, this inspired business model failed: the last time I was in Vegas, I learned that the shoe store no longer featured a soundtrack of sole singers.
I don't know about you, but if we were playing a word association game, and you said "Teamsters", my first response would not be "karaoke". Nevertheless, in the autumn of 2000, I found myself watching a karaoke show at the Teamsters' Hall in Fargo, North Dakota. To tell you the truth, my initial fear was that this might be some sort of plot to supply the members with a few geeks to beat up on, but everyone was, in fact, quite friendly. Until I ordered a beer, that is. I told the waitress I wanted a Miller Lite and she looked at me as if I had just asked if I could inspect her head for lice. I was clueless until I noticed one of my friends out of the corner of my eye carefully mouthing out the words, "Non-union beer". I quickly re-ordered (Bud Light) and everything was OK, but for a moment there I felt like Jane Fonda at a VFW convention. I was tempted to request a Dos Equis for my second round, but then I remembered the waitress's angry glare and I decided that I didn't want to spend eternity pushing up Astroturf next to Jimmy Hoffa in the Giants Stadium end zone.
For the uninitiated, an evening of karaoke works something like this: when you arrive, you find books on every table listing the different songs available to be performed. The best of these books have their listings cross-referenced both by artist and title. The standard fare includes pop and country songs from the past half-century, but some places offer you the chance to warble television themes ("Gilligan's Island" is, for some reason, a popular choice among
