The Beating of Our Hearts is the Only Sound

A woman Kristin works with just bought one of the model homes here on Snoqualmie Ridge that we toured three years ago when we were thinking of buying new construction. Their house-warming party was Friday night and although it was a little weird to be back in a house we once considered buying, we had a good time. Kristin caught a cold last week and had no voice for the party which, unbeknownst to me, would result in all Karaoke responsibilties being firmly placed on my shoulders. Other than the Karaoke Revolution games on the Playstation 2, I had never sang Karaoke before. And certainly not in a crowd full of strangers.

I watched the microphone go back and forth a couple of times while absently flipping through the book of available songs. Little did I know that when I jokingly suggested Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now" that it would end up being ME doing the singing. Gulp! I was a bit nervous at first, after all I only knew about 3 or 4 people in the room (and these were Kristin's co-workers after all) but I soon started having fun with it. I was belting out the verses and making up words for the never-ending chorus. The Karaoke thingamabob we were using scores how well you do and would you believe that I posted a 89 out of 100 on the Tiffany song -- a score that would hold up as the highest score of the night despite hours of continued play?!?

Although I would like to say pretending to be a teenage one-cover-song-wonder on a mall float was the highlight of my evening, it wasn't. That would be singing "Bohemian Rhapsody" with a software engineer named Dietrich. Dietrich has a deep bellowing voice which he projects as if he's on stage at Radio City Music Hall so I had to really put some effort into singing loud enough to even register on the microphone. We eventually found our rhythym and were able to alternate lines to imitate the opera-esque song's intent. And it was quite fun, even if the song never seemed to end. We received a standing ovation from those in the room (or maybe we didn't, I can't remember) but despite our best Freddy Mercury impersonation, we failed to top the score I reached with Tiffany.

I'd like to say that it will hopefully be years before I have to do any Karaoke again, but it was actually pretty fun. Sure, that's probably because Kristin wasn't drinking and I drank all the Moose Drool we brought, but the Leadsinger Karaoke thing is pretty cool. It's just a wired microphone that plugs into the tv and you can purchase extra song chips that you insert into the microphone. You can check it out right here. The chips aren't cheap, but after seeing how many people enjoyed playing it at htis party, I think we might need to get it as an emergency backup plan in case this year's Super Bowl turns out to be a dud.