Sometime in the late 90′s, Allison, our friend Stef and I went to Phoenix to spend Thanksgiving with her family. We love having holidays there, not only because her folks are awesome, warm, wonderful people, but Ali’s mom makes a point to remember our favorite liquor and keeps a stocked bar. She’s a class act.
Anyway, that particular Thanksgiving, we did the turkey thing and Leslie, Ali’s sister, made her usual dramatic commentary about the cranberries and then after some hanging out and pie, Stef, Allison and I decided to try to find a place that had karaoke.
Since it was Thanksgiving, not every bar was open, but we found one called The Purple Turtle that featured karaoke that night. Ali grew up in Phoenix, but wasn’t familiar with the place. We decided to give it a go anyway and ventured off into the crisp Arizona night.
The Purple Turtle turned out to be a Latino biker bar, or so we discovered after being frisked upon entrance, by a guy in leather pants, a mammoth belt buckle and a very, very long mustache. We must’ve looked like the three gringoest gringos from gringotown.
One very tall, very bikery, very intimidating guy stood up and gave Stef, who has hair we fondly call The Cluckle (think Corey Feldman with a short spiky gelled ‘do), the classic cross-armed stance and super stink-eye. We all looked at each other like, “Act natural.”
Then, moments later, Giant Bikery Dude broke into a huge smile and warmly invited us to sit down. The place was totally hopping, packed, with a couple of little chubby middle-aged women shaking their booties and singing Selena on the karaoke stage like it was their last night on earth.
We ordered beers, everyone was having a great time and then Stef got up to sing. In classic Stef fashion, he did Wham!’s “Careless Whisper”. It got really awkward in there during that. Everyone looked uncomfortable, not because Stef is a bad singer — he’s quite good, but it wasn’t the right venue for that particular song, I guess. I think Ali sang… I don’t know, something offensive, probably… and that was a big hit, as usual. I think I did Donna Summer and c’mon, who doesn’t like a party song? But something about Wham! set the bar on edge.
When Stef finished, you could hear a pin drop. Ok, it wasn’t that quiet, but there was definitely… tension. So we paid for our drinks and hustled our happy asses out of there before he could put up Matchbox 20.
Upon arriving home, Leslie was up, so we all sat around, drinking beer and writing what we dubbed ‘nonsense poetry’. We all just spouted words, whatever came into our head at that moment, rhyming or not, and Leslie would jot them down in a notebook in a freestyle poem.
This morning, I got an email from Allison that contained all our poems from that night — she’d found them somewhere. So, for posterity, I close with the fruits of our warped, turkey and Wham-laden minds from a night in the nineties.
It’s poetry. Dig it, man. *snaps* Continue reading
We’re also going to miss a Core Conversation I was interested in checking out: 