There was no real lead up to that afternoon...aside from one of my co-workers deflecting queries a month before from his students about an upcoming karaoke presentation he was going to participate in. He had let that item slip out in class and found himself being badgered to divulge details. He held his ground, refused to give out any details, and the matter failed to get any further mention.
That is until I went out for drinks on a Saturday night and mentioned the matter to the proprietress of the establishment. She smiled and told me she was going to be performing at the same event...and would I like to buy a ticket. I said "Sure, why not?" and thus found myself the next afternoon sitting through three hours of enka tunes with a bit of dancing added in.
My co-worker came by to say "Hi" before the show started. He was nervous as heck and had a drink in his hand which he was consuming in an effort to calm down his stage fright. I'd hazard to say that seemed to do the trick as he was able to do both his numbers, a duet and a solo number, without any glaring problems. He got a more than warm round of applause during his solo effort (after being egged on by the MC with reminders of "Don't sing in English!"). Naturally, I did make a short video clip of each of his performances...to show to his students. Hey, what are friends for eh?
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Thursday last week was sunny and quite pleasant. I drove to work that day since that's what I always do on Wednesdays and Thursdays. As I reached the outskirts of town I noticed that were a number of dragonflies in the air...some of them coupled. I remembered that a co-worker had said that he was afraid of dragonflies. I had thought then "Well, I can sort of see that". Well, as I drove along their numbers increased. There could've been dozens of them flying past me as I drove up the road. By the time I reached the next town their presence was starting to get a bit unnerving. The good thing is that I didn't get any stuck on my vehicle. I had had this happen to me last year when driving up to Tendo to watch a soccer match. There's nothing quite as distracting as seeing a big dragonfly stuck on your windshield wiper as you drive along.
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Going back to the topic of karaoke: What does one get when you mix two drunk guys (I wasn't one of them) with a song neither of them were asked to sing...but felt they had to because someone had requested them to sing it? Typically the response would be a polite round of hand waving and "Sorry I couldn't possibly do it" followed by a quick jab at the "Cancel this song" button. But this past Sunday the response was more along the lines of "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!". I don't recall the title of the song but it was a duet, an aria-like number which was quite popular about 15-20 years ago. On a wild guess I'd say it was made popular by Pavarotti or, less likely to be correct, Sarah Brightman(sic).
Nonetheless, that night the song started and the two guys found themselves wondering what they were going to do given their inebriated states. One fellow got the baritone part and the other got the tenor part. It started off with the male lead singing the first verse. Our baritone singer immediately flubbed up the words (they were in Italian) and all he could manage was a bit that sounded a bit like "con so...". That quickly became "kon-so-me", as in "consomme" soup. Needless to say not a single word of the original lyrics came out from there on. It was a steady string of "kon-so-me" and "wakame" (yes, it's that wakame, the seaweed one often finds in miso soup) sung by both fellows until the end of the song. That was accompanied by gales of hysterical laughter from the everyone else in the establishment. The whole thing was irreverent, jack-ass-like stupid, a touch inspired, and so atypical. It's not every night where one encounters bust-a-gut laughter in a snack....
