I hope it still counts as National Karaoke Week, because I want to write about karaoke again.
Most specifically, a karaoke experience I had in January 2012 that I hope to remember all my life.
I was visiting my friend in Chicago and I had just had a haircut -- a haircut that the lady cab driver who took us home that night at 4 AM said made me look like Diana Ross, ie a really great one.
We went to karaoke at the VFW Hall near my friend's house, and the whole place and the whole experience I can only describe as "heavenly and bizarre". In the heavenly column, Maker's Mark and ginger cost us only $3, and in the bizarre: well, so many things, but I'll start with the implacable and enormous ladies' room attendant who silently guarded the paper towels whilst reading a series of paranormal romance novels.
The karaoke performance I remember from that night isn't my own (which was an entirely forgettable rendition of "Me and Julio Down By The Schoolguard"), but Commander Bill's. It was a VFW hall, remember, so it seemed only natural (?) that the karaoke impresario should be an elderly black man in full naval dress whites. He regularly reminded singers not to swear on the mike because "there are ladies present".
And then he took the mike himself, and hidden behind a bank of audio equipment so that only the top of his white hat showed, he sang this song.
*
The song: Billy Paul, "Me and Mrs Jones"; 1972
Sometimes songs hit you in exactly the right time and place for you to remember them in a different way forever. This was the time and place for me and "Me and Mrs Jones".
There were many more notable things about this experience (including Commander Bill's dog, a fat and bug-eyed chihuahua named Whispers) but the most personally notable was that it inspired me to write again.
I had been in a spell of extreme writers' block/depression -- for writers I believe this is two terms for the same thing -- since April 2010, and although I still wrote things like e-mails and grant proposals and press releases and all that, I didn't really write. Or I guess I felt like I didn't. It hurt.
But karaoke at the VFW hall was such a capital-E Experience that it grabbed me by the guts and said, "get OVER yourself, you HAVE to write this down". So the next day I bought a notebook at the Safeway by my friend's house and on the four-hour train ride from Chicago to Ann Arbor I wrote an essay I called "24/7".
A month later I started my blog, and this is its 100th entry. (I found myself engaging in a bit of a similar reflection at the 50th.)
I don't always love my blog. Sometimes I read old entries through my fingers (that one I linked to up there) and sometimes I can't read them at all. But what I love about it is that it is, unimpeachably, writing. And what's more, and even better, writing that lives on the Internet and that other people can see (although that part also freaks me out sometimes).
But even if I knew that no one would ever read it again, I would still write in this blog. There are very few things in life more painful than knowing that your self-image isn't in line with what you are actually doing, and I found it extremely painful to be a writer who didn't, couldn't, wouldn't write.
I know I am a writer because my first reaction when I hear or see or do something interesting is, "I have to write that down." But it took me a while to see that that is really all it is.
Yrs,
AW
inbedwithamywilson@gmail.com
