"You're kidding! You're 36? You don't look any older than 32!"

This, from a guy definitely younger than 25.... Nice. Amazingly, I was drunk enough to still take it as a compliment.

I am still on vacation until March 9th, but if I'm going to recycle old posts, I gotta share these..... My karaoke/spa weekend in The Dells are my two are my two all-time favorite posts. Enjoy!

My best friend from college is in town for a visit this weekend, so we decided to spend the night up in the Wisconsin Dells at Sundara Spa, this chi-chi spa that is all about serenity and inner peace and aligning your chakra while wandering the feng shui facilities.... While we were getting our pedicures, my choice of gold toenail polish made it apparent that I had other things on my agenda than engaging in a peaceful evening of quiet soul-searching conversation in front of our room's fireplace. I asked my aestheticion where two ladies might find some karaoke on a Friday night and she gave us directions to the Showboat Saloon. I thought gold nailpolish might be just the thing for a venue by the name of Showboat and that raucous, drunken singing might also be par for the course. Oh, lordy, were we in for a treat!

We arrived at the saloon primed to go from a fab steak dinner at Field's and set up a tab to keep the whiskey drinks a-flowin'. I got busy selecting some songs from the massive karaoke folder.... Not everyone knows this about me, although if you met me you would probably pick up on it pretty quickly, but I am a total rock star in my own mind. I love to sing and, quite honestly, there is no better time out on the town than one that ends up with me behind a microphone with words being lit up in yellow on a nearby television screen. Add at least two admiring and enthusiastic audience members (I'm not too greedy/needy!) and I am higher than a kite.

The Showboat was absolutely howling-- there was a huge group of women there that all worked together and were out celebrating a birthday or some such, and were extremely well-lubed by 10pm when we arrived. The fact that half of the younger girls were grinding on the other half of older ladies to some raunchy 90's tune was a sure indication that they were sauced. They were getting up and singing country songs, so I started with Patsy Cline's "Walkin' After Midnight." Sure enough, as tight-knit groups tend to do, they cleared the dance floor as soon as an unknown party took the stage. Blah. I hate that. So, after waiting an excruciating amount of time, I finally got to do another one.... The Scorpions "Rock You Like a Hurricane". This is NOT one of my standards, but the skank level in the joint was through the roof, so I really wanted to pull the audience in and I happen to know the song well through my standing Guitar Hero addiction. I hate to brag (okay, fine, I LOVE to brag) but I totally knocked that song out of the ballpark. The DJ actually said, "THAT FUCKING ROCKED!!!!!!!" when I gave him the mic back. :) :) :) I could barely carry my head off the stage, it was so effing big.

My voice was in good shape, so I was starting to get some big ideas on what I could carry off. My next song was TLC's "Creep." Truly playing to the crowd, which, by this time, was amazingly, staggeringly trashed.... The dance floor was packed, girls singing along, and I was hitting my notes despite changing octaves pretty frequently (the song is so low in parts that I had to keep switching to avoid missing notes). Totally great and so fun to have a crowd just going wild-- I am used to performing in this tiny little place called the Karaoke Kid that usually has no more that 12 people in it. I can totally see how being a real, live rock star would be the biggest, most addictive high in the world. Not to mention how it would turn you into a hideous, egomaniacal asshole.

This post is getting horrendously long, so I will continue tomorrow with PART II.... The Holy Grail of karaoke show-stoppers....

You can also relive some of the magic by checking out this playlist that includes the two songs I mentioned..... Amy's Raunchy Playlist

Finally! Validation for the Purchase of Seven Jeans

First, if you haven't read yesterday's post: do so now. OK, now that that is out of the way, lets continue with this saga of drunken rockin'-ness.... I have left out an important part of K.'s and my evening: an employee of the bar, who I swear, is employed just to make all the girls horny and think that they've got a shot at getting laid that night. The only other place I have seen employ people for this purpose was at Nikki Beach in Miami's South Beach. There were girls there whose main job was to go out on the dance floor, make the fellas feel good and make sure that everyone is having, not just a good time, but the TIME OF THEIR LIFE. Check out this photo of the employee's uniform to see how they accomplish this: imagine this girl, in that dress, 6' feet tall....that's right: those cut-outs in the dress are just about eye leve for the average dude on the dance floor needing to have his ego inflated. Yow!! (I actually talked to one of the girls about their dress code and she assured me that the only thing you needed to look amazing in the dress were fake boobs, leading me to the realization that for girls in South Beach.... Boob jobs are not an optional enhancement, they are a required investment in their future.

Now: cut to snowy Wisconsin and imagine how a handsome party boy might be the answer to a small-town bar's question on how to get the clientèle to drink more and have a better time at their establishment than any other bar in the area. Enter "Andy." And his friend, Turtle (I think his name was Chris, but he looked so much like Turtle from Entourage that it rendered his real name irrelevant). These guys got the party started as soon as they took the mic away from the drunken ladies with their country sing-a-longs (which were great in their own way) and turned the volume up to 11 with a duet on "Big Butts" that also "FUCKING ROCKED!!!!!" After their first performance they started to mingle with the ladies. K. and I, social anthropologists and resident "old ladies" of the scene, were intrigued by this turn of events and inquired to find out more about this Andy, who quite literally had three women grinding on him on the dance floor. Apparently he was a bar employee and also has a girlfriend. The bartender who confirmed he had a girlfriend gave me this hilarious wide-eyed look with a shake of his head, like "I know it is impossible to believe and I pity the poor woman who has to deal with his flirting and grinding with every drunken lady patron who crosses our threshhold!" After I did "Creep" I got a bit of the Andy treatment, as I exited the stage and he and Turtle did the Night at the Roxbury SNL thing where they bounced me between their brawny chests. Not exactly a sexy grind, like the younger girls got, but I was comfortable with this level of attention. Heee!

The bar dudes performing "Big Butts"

At this point the evening starts to blur together a bit, as I was working on my 4th, maybe 5th, Beam and Coke. What I remember is thinking that I wanted to pick the most amazing finale song I could come up with and we couldn't leave until then. I picked Smashmouth "All Star" and, though it was alright, I didn't realize just how difficult it would be for me to sing that low, so I ended up feeling like I didn't sing very well, even though I think my exuberance (drunken exuberance) carried the song. So then I had to do just one more (thank God K. loves me) to go out with a bang. I was feeling crazy. I was feeling dangerous. I was feeling like..... QUEEN. And then I stepped to the edge, looked over it, and leaped. BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY. Alright, alright, actually I only had the nerve to do this song because I recruited this lady who had been belting out some big songs throughout the night. She agreed to do the song with me even though she expressed some doubts that we could carry it off. I handed the piece of paper with the song info and our names to the DJ. His eyebrows went up. His assistant's eyebrows went up. Then they both nodded their heads, like yes, yes,.... this could be something amazing.... or disastrous.

Again, I would like to reiterate just how inebriated the joint was and how many people were on the dance floor and how I had just been swung around the dance floor by a twenty-something yummy and had another guy come up to K. and I to say that he would just like to say that 1.) I had a great ass (YES! Seven Jeans officially now worth their weight in gold.), 2.) I had an amazing voice, and 3.) Both of us were like totally hot for being moms and older and all. We told him we were 36 and that is when we got our back-handed compliment of "Wow! You totally don't look older than 32!" Thanks, young pup, thank you very much.

So, Riley and I finally get our names called to go perform. Bohemian Rhapsody comes up on title screen and the crowd is like "no, way, murmur, murmur,..." I say into the mic, "Hubris is wonderful thing, ya'll!! WHOOOOOOOO!!!!!!" (OMG, did I really say that?) And then we proceed to sing our hearts out. Riley was more than up to the task and, honestly, I felt like I was just trying to keep up with her for most of the song, but from the stage, it seemed like things were going pretty fantastic. K. informed me that during the instrumental break, while I was rocking and bouncing all over the stage, Riley was getting her ample bosoms signed by admiring audience members! I need the line prompt from the TV while I sing, so she was busy working the audience during the whole song, while I was getting my lines fed to me. And then the song ended and we got one more "THAT FUCKING ROCKED!!! OH MY GOD!!" I handed the mic back to the DJ and told him we had to go now and he asked if I was coming back tomorrow. I informed him that I would love to come back for an encore (again, did I really say that??) but that I had to return back to my real life as mom of three and super-wife. He encouraged me to come back to the Showboat anytime, they were there every weekend for karaoke. And I thought to myself, yes, I would like to come back here tomorrow night and every weekend hereafter. And then realized that maybe that was a little pathetic, but that it might be ok to want to come back at some point. I could drag my husband along so he could have a chance to bask in the glow of my rockstar amazing-ness. I like to keep him on his toes, reminding him that I am not just his wife and mother of our three hyper children but a vital, sexy woman that is even better than the young thing I used to be. Rooooooooar!

Now believe me when I say to you that I hope I don't come off as being completely self-deluded and hilariously vain.... I know I can be, but a night like this was just too awesome and I've never done karaoke where there was such a big crowd and I'm afraid that I am completely hooked and still a bit drunk from the high of having a crowd go nuts. It is about a million times better than working on dinner for hours and then having all your kids ask for hotdogs instead, folks, and in the wearisome drudgery of real-life I think a little self-delusion might be not just okay, but pretty super-fantastic.
Now--- leave a comment telling me about the best karaoke song you have done or wish you could do.