Sunday, August 21, 2011

Whatever happened to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?

Donatello qualified as a CPA in 1998; Raphael is a dental surgeon in Long Beach, and Michelangelo teaches at a liberal arts college in Conneticut. None of them have spoken to Leonardo, last seen sleeping rough in Brooklyn three years ago.

Tonight we went for dinner at a Greek restaurant and ate far too much, then walked down to the lower east side, where, next to the fantastically grotty St Mark's Hotel, there is a strip of karaoke joints. We ended up in wewantU2sing, a Korean run place with a very strange set of songs available.

They had Blur. Well, fair enough, Blur were sort of visible in the late 90s round the world. They had Cockney Rebel. Less international. They had three different versions of Rabbit by Chas & Dave. It was about then I concluded they were taking the piss. The world doesn't need two different karaoke versions of Rabbit, let alone three. But I sang it anyway, after my Tom Jones impression on Delilah was criticised as sounding 'too Russian'. It's a hard life for me sometimes.

The reverb on the microphones was set to max, making it sound like you were performing live from the middle of St John The Divine, but as all controls and displays were only in Korean, and we had nobody who could shout sufficiently loud enough in Korean to chastise the staff, there was nothing we could do about that. As the room filled with more and more people and the volume got higher and higher, I grew slow. We have to fly back in nine hours, so we should be rested and ready for the trip, not staying out to all hours pounding shots and doing impressions of Rick Astley.

Which is why we went back to our friends' apartment and played Fruit Ninja until daybreak. What idiots we sometimes are.

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