A friend and I met at Yakitori Boy for Friday night karaoke and yakitori, a type of Japanese food which is meats and other things grilled and served on a skewer. I tried the bacon and quail, pork, and short rib skewers and each was tasty but an expensive way to put together a meal.

The initial karaoke crowd was mostly black women singing standards every few minutes rotated in with some J-pop that was inscrutable to me. The crowd built over the evening and my partner and I spent about an hour going through the list of available songs and talking louder and louder at one another as the crowd built. Small groups came in and the average BAC grew. Every third song was dominated by a large white man who would “aide” the person singing. He was loud and largely in tune and at a critical point, it’s the singer’s fault if he or she can be overpowered by a single unamplified person.

My copilot tore up an Alanis Morisette track and I did a mediocre Mr. Brightside. I blame it on congestion and having yelled for most of the evening. I looked through the songbook again and settled on “Wonderwall” as being appropriately within my range. We waited through a few more songs and the rotation came out to 1/2 drunk singing, 1/4 J-pop, 1/8 just bad, 1/8 really good. Finally, Wonderwall came up and myself and tall cross-dressed black man both went for the mic at the same time. We had apparently both picked the same song and both sang. I was more familiar with the verses but he belted the refrain in a cloud of alcohol and rainbows. Every time he did so, I’d laugh and stop singing and he would sing louder to help which was even funnier creating this big gay feedback loop.

After the song we talked and I learned that his name was Geranimo and thought my singing fabulous.