Know your audience

Friday night I went to the OC to karaoke with a bunch of people. Normally when I go to karaoke Best Friend and I go to a place in Venice where there's a stage and a captive audience and room to dance. But the place we went Friday was basically a restaurant where during your turn to sing you sort of wander around with the mic, serenading everybody.

Early in the night some mysterious benefactor - who we all believed was this dude with a cowboy hat and sunglasses - offered $500 for a contest. The first five people to get the whole bar to sing get $100 each.

Now, the place in Venice would have been easy. It's a young crowd and I've been there enough times to know what gets everybody going. Oddly enough one of the better songs is "Gloria." You could also get a big reaction with "Santeria."

But this was not the place in Venice. This was a place in Tustin. The crowd was a little older, less Hollywood, a little more country. The song list was packed with Reba MacIntyre. I don't do country.

So what do I sing that will get these people going?

"Hey Jude" took a prize at our table. Then "Dancing Queen" took a prize for the drunk girls in the back. Then two guys from our table sang something by Queen I think and took another prize for our table. The prizes were disappearing.

I examined my crowd. I had to pick a song that would get them all singing - one song everybody knows, everybody loves, and everybody would sing. One song that would be a hit at any karaoke bar anywhere. A song I can nail in my sleep.

I went up to the guy. There was this dude standing there looking at the computer where my song was listed under his name going "I'm not singing that song. She put that in for me - I didn't put it in. I'm not singing it."

So I said "Hey, that's the song I was going to sing."

So the guy deletes the dude's name and puts mine in. And I sang it. And I ran up to the old people and sang it in their faces. And I ran up to the dude in deep conversation and sang a lyric to him, at which point he went "whoa." And I held up the microphone while everybody shouted along. And I won the last $100.

To be honest, though, I have to admit I kind of cheated. I sang "Sweet Caroline."