Just Another Evening at the Pub

Boy--I really felt like a country boy yesterday evening...

After dinner, I went with three of my colleagues to a nearby pub just to sit and relax and chat for a while. We didn't know exactly where to go so, when one of them spotted a club with a neon blue martini glass on the sign out front, we headed that way, but to our dismay its entrance was in the middle of a dark alley and the interior looked very questionable (envision the Biker Club from Pee Wee Herman), so we kept going.

As we passed an empty shopping cart on the sidewalk, my buddy Mike D. muttered something about someone losing their home...

We sat down to Irish coffees and a red-headed singer reminiscent of a roughed-up Susan Sarandon (not among my favorite actresses), took her red electric guitar to the mike and started playing. I thought she was a great guitarist, but couldn't believe she could make a living singing--it sounded like she gargled gravel every morning.

The guys I was with, even after five straight days of being aound each other all day, insisted on talking passionately about things involving business, and I, being in a different department and also considering the fact that I seriously didn't care to talk about work, started paying less attention to them and was keeping an ear open to the music. The funny thing is that she played a mix of Averil Levigne, Cat Stevens, the Eagles, and John Lennon--eclectic enough that it could have even come out of my Ipod. Just when nobody was paying attention, "she" dramatically dropped her voice and sang "Sixteen Tons", in a deep bass voice that rivals mine! Aha! So that was the gimick, straight out of Victor/Victoria--a trans-gender singer (later confirmed by the singer herself, who finished the song, grinned, and asked "Any Questions?"--someone replied "Yeah--What's the capital of New Zealand?")...Well, welcome to San Francisco...

The funny thing was watching my buddy's reaction--he is homophobic to the point of irrational behavior, so during "Sixteen Tons", my immediate reflex was to whirl around and see him squirm on his barstool and the hair shoot up straight on the back of his neck. I don't know exactly what he is afraid of, but he gets practically violent in situations like this, so before long he started giving me a hard time about enjoying the music, which I was.

As they continued drolling about how the spacing of the taskbar on screen A51 should be right centered and not left centered, and the option for xx should be "greyed out", I got another Irish coffee and relaxed before my 12-hour day tomorrow--MD nudged me and spat out "Don't tell me you're enjoying this shit?"

I fished some money out of my wallet and realized that MD was going to give me a hard time about leaving any money--If someone is a half-decent musician, I generally leave something for them--Fran and I used to go to an Italian restaurant in our neighborhood which featured live piano music, and the woman came to know us over the years--Fran would always request "Isn't it Romantic?" and we would leave her a nice tip because she played beautifully. One time, even after we hadn't been in for a year or so, we walked in the restaurant and the piano player, who was toward the end of a song, held a cord, and then launched into "Isn't it Romantic?" as we were being seated at the table (now I know how the president must feel when they play "Hail to the Chief").

We got up to leave and I went over to put the money in her tip jar--another of the guys scrambled to take a picture of me with his cell phone since I was tipping a trans-gender (Oh, the search engine hits I'm going to get...) singer, which I suppose in some way makes me less manly or something?

We walked back to the hotel quietly. As we passed a menagerie of crazies shaking cups and begging for change, I turned to MD and told him "I give money for no less than being a trans-gender lounge singer." He laughed.

Well, it's definitely something you don't see every day...