If I have one guilty pleasure, it is definitely karaoke. I would go singing every night, if I could.
To say I am a karaoke slut is almost an understatement. I would be a karaoke whore if I could find a way. Which is to say, I would do it every night for a living, if I could. And I would never get tired of it.
Mr. O’Reilly is the one who got me hooked on it. It started innocently enough, long ago, when we were still “best buds” and I had no idea it would ever come to anything more than that. Mr. O. began dragging me out to sing because he needed a partner for “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and I was the only fool willing to get up there and embarrass myself. Ted and I did our first Paradise duet maybe 9 years ago or so. We got better than polite applause, I mean people REALLY clapped. I was hooked.
That was, like, 9 or 10 years ago. As we moved through the phases of our lives from “lifelong childhood friends” (to paraphrase the first Mayor Daley) to “misery loves company drinking buddies” to “fuck buddies” to actually dating, karaoke was one of the things that remained a constant source of pleasure, joy, arguments, jealousy, and entertainment
“Paradise” is still the best thing we do. If you don’t know the song, it is really 3 mini-songs that tell a story. It starts out with a teenaged boy, parked by the lake with the prettiest girl in school. As the action gets hotter, he becomes convinced that “We’re gonna go all the way tonight . . . .. Tonight’s the night.” Then the main action cuts to the grainy sound of a baseball announcer as heard over the AM radio. The commentator describes a player’s daring run around the bases, all of which is a double-entendre for the boy’s progress with the girl. Just as the player (and presumably the boy in the car) is about to slide into home, the girl yells out “Stop right there, I gotta know right now, do you love me? . . . And will you love me forever? ” They argue but, of course the girl wins this round and the boy swears he will love her “until the end of time.” The last part is about both of them grown and married, “praying for the end of time, so I can end my time with you.”
Over the years we have refined this 8 ½ -minute song into a mini-musical theater production. I sing almost the entire backup as well as my own part, and we act out the whole song even as we are singing it. The whole make-out scene during the baseball commentary is just a boob-groping, ass-grabbing groin-grinding good time, punctuated with my live moans over the ones on the track. When it comes to the part where the girl cries out, “Stop right there!” I push Ted away so hard he is forced to stumble, even though he knows it’s coming. We pour a ton of energy into this performance. And it is hot! And the audience loves it.
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