KARAOKE JUST ISN'T WHAT IT USED TO BE

Tonight, our ward activity committee held a fundraiser activity for the Boy Scouts. They had a soup/salad dinner & silent auction at the Poulson barn...and I wish I could say that was all they had - but no. The Castle Pines ward apparently knows that a party isn't a party without some form of entertainment. That's where the karaoke comes in. It wasn't your typical karaoke party, because in lieu of allowing people to sign themselves up to sing, they did it by nomination. How does that work? Well basically, people could request a song AND the person that they wanted to have perform it. The idea was that they could make additional money for the fundraiser by having people pay to actually STOP the singing if it was bad - a Karaoke Gong show if you will. Clever idea really.

I didn't understand the karaoke rules when the activity began, which is why I looked at my friend Wendy and said "Is this a karaoke party too? Why would anyone EVER want to voluntarily do karaoke in front of their entire ward? It's one thing to do karaoke in a bar when you and your friends are the only sober people there - but it's entirely different when it's your ward and EVERYONE is sober." After listening for a few minutes, I went back to my chair to sit with Ethan and talk to my friend Liz, who then explained how the evening of "singing" was supposed to work.

That's about the time that John Sabey got called up to sing "If I Were a Rich Man" from Fiddler on the Roof. Talk about a good laugh...but eventually someone forked over some money to make him stop. About 4 performances later, Madeline Hansen nominated her dad, Dave to sing A Whole New World (yes, from Aladdin). Now being an attorney by trade, Dave decided to negotiate his way to sweet freedom by paying $20 to "pass it forward". That's when I heard my name over the mic...which was not at all what I was expecting. So, there I stood, in front of the ward party involuntarily singing A Whole New World. By the end of the song (you know, the part in the movie when Jasmine and Aladdin are singing back and forth to eachother - staring longingly into eachothers eyes as they float over the city on their magic carpet) I looked around to see if someone was going to save me from my pain, but I got nothin & had to finish out the world's longest karaoke song. (Truth be told, the longest karaoke song ever is Copacabana - I learned that the hard way in DC...I'm sure some of you remember that night. I think it was Lorile's bachelorette party). It was very difficult to hear the music with all the noise in the barn, but surprisingly, I must've been somewhat in tune because people actually seemed to think I did a good job...and they were sober (I think). ( :

*Note: this activity was NOT held in an animal barn...just in case you were wondering.