Karaoke

Tom and I were invited to a couples Christmas White Elephant party. It was the perfect opportunity to unload one of the auction prizes Tom had purchased at a charity Auction earlier this year. He had bought an airplane parachute drop. Neither of us wanted to use it and I am not letting my boys go do it. Trevor thought it was cool, but he is such a big boy. You have to be strapped on to someone else.

A friend took her niece for a birthday gift to this same place. She ended up with a broken ankle on landing. The whole idea to me was kind of like giving a Japanese person a knife as a gift. You don't because it implies that you want them to commit suicide. I learned that after I gave a carving board and fancy knife set to an ex boyfriend as a wedding gift. My Japanese girlfriend hooted with laughter when she heard what I had gifted and explained to me my error. Giving the gift of jumping out of an airplane falls into that same category. I can't gift it to anyone I like, but in a white elephant exchange some one can choose it for themselves. If anything it is a conversation piece.

We had to take two gifts, one for each of us. The other white elephant gift was a pampered chef ice shaver I had purchased at a party years ago, still pristine in the box, never used. Definitely a white elephant gift, but in the right hands perhaps something someone would want and use.

At the party we drew different gifts. We ended up with a new wine bottle opener, which was perfect as our old one had a piece fall off making it difficult to use. I picked a scarf, but one of the husbands traded me the lovely scarf for the wine opener and gave the scarf to his wife. Tom opened a gift obviously containing a bottle of wine which someone traded with him. some how after all the exchanging was done he ended the gift exchange with a small bottle of Crown Royal.

The party moved on to Karaoke. Now Tom has banned me from ever singing karaoke on threat of divorce our whole marriage. I have done it once and some how the DJ couldn't find my second selection after I sang the first one. I got the hint. When in eighth grade, the Music teacher asked me to mouth the words as I threw off the rest of the class, I knew I was bad. Tom had imbibed a few cocktails over the course of the evening so he felt comfortable trying out his voice for every one's pleasure. He wanted Stix or the Beach Boys or the Beattles, all popular tunes until he sang them.

OMG, he was awful. He was so bad it was comic. I almost wet the couch I was sitting on laughing so hard. My sides ached and I couldn't stop laughing every time he got his hands on the mike. He kept trying and the crowd generously let him sink his own ship. I lay there on the couch, unable to stop laughing. It was that quiet shacking laugh with no sound until I snorted. I had never really heard Tom sing. In the car he turns the radio way up so you can't distinguish his voice.

Tom was oblivious as he tried to set his own beat to the music, about two beats too slow. Everyone else had some talent and knew the words and were a pleasure to hear. Tom was going at it with deep gusto and heart, but it was hysterically bad. I loved every painful minute as for years he had forbidden me to sing and now I finally got to hear him. He made me sound almost like a Diva by comparison. I have not had such fun and laughed so hard in I can't think when.

I want to get a Karaoke set up for us. Partly we were bad because neither of us knew all the lyrics by heart. If you read the lines as they lit up, you had already fallen behind in the music. You had to know the words prior to their printing out on screen. Practice might improve our performances... or not.

It was a fantastically fun night.

I did have to drive us home. I had been drinking my watered down wine so I wouldn't be hung over. I was prepared to drive. The problem was we had come in Tom's Cadillac with its stick shift. It was a dark and foggy night. The stick shift is not lit up. Reverse and first are next to each other with second behind and third up. The driveway where the party was held was long and unlit with a slightly steep slope right when it meets the street. Of course a car was coming down the road at 1:30am when we left the party which meant I had to stop on the slope before pulling out onto the road. I killed the car three times and burned rubber not realizing I was putting the car in second and not first. Tom was about ready to switch places with me when I finally turned on the dome light to look at the stick shift again and figure out why I kept killing the engine. Once I pulled out on the road it was smooth sailing all the way home.

I woke this morning feeling completely refreshed and grinning ear to ear every time I think about my delightful man trying to sing in front of a crowd of very tolerant people, over and over again. We need to practice more, if that would even help.