With all the sadness and trauma going on in the world at the moment, it is worth reflecting on the death of a very important person, which almost went unnoticed back in 1996.
Larry LaPrise, the man who wrote The Hokey Pokey, died peacefully at the age of 83. The most traumatic part for his family was getting him into the coffin.
They put his left leg in… and then the trouble started.
I was chatting with an IBM colleague in Irvine, California today, and he ended the conversation by sharing one of his favorite quotes: “There is no package as small as a man who is tightly wrapped up in himself.” Things that make you go, “Hmmmmm.”
I worked from home today and edited three books: the RSA ACE/Server Adapter for Windows, the RSA ACE/Server Adapter for Unix, and the GroupWise Adapter.
I met Joe and his sister Kathy, her husband Al, and their two daughters, Amy and Allison for dinner at Lily’s. We had two killer pizzas, though Ally “had a little problem” with the mushroom-only one she requested. Kids. It was nice to meet them. I look forward to the drag show on Friday night with Kathy.
I got to Flex at about 10:15, and sat listening to, for the most part, poor Karaoke. What’s more amazing than the number of tone deaf singers there, is the number who don’t recognize themselves as such.
Case in point. Andrew. He got up there to sing Josh Groban’s You Raise Me Up, and he prefaced it by saying, “I’m going to sing this at my sister’s wedding this weekend.” There was a collective sigh or groan in the place, as I’m sure most of us wondered, “Has she ever heard you sing?”
Case in point. Josh. Lately he has been singing less of his signature screamers, Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend and Bad Moon Rising, and has been doing Barbra Streisand’s Somewhere. It’s just awful, awful, awful how he does it, and apparently has no idea that it is.
Though I said that he’s doing less of Diamonds… he has not stopped. Last night he had a legal-sized yellow pad up on stage and he sang Diamonds… in his caricature Carol Channing voice to words that he evidently made up that he evidently thinks are hysterical. We found no audience members to corroborate this premise. So he’s screaming the song to words that are not up on the monitor, and just-a-smiling at himself like he’s the Flexican Idol or something. Tragic.
Case in point. Mike. Who rolls his eyes at the others, and then proceeds to the stage with his own version of tone deafness. Bless his heart.
Toward the end of the night, things took a real wicked turn. Some black people were finishing a song on the stage — it may have been a Michael Jackson song — perhaps that’s how it got started, and they made some comment about him being free — a celebratory comment.
Then, the guy standing next to me, whom I’d been socializing with during the night, suddenly went off about the Michael Jackson verdict. Oh my god, he started singing really loudly, enough so that people in the place were turning and looking at him, as he just kept going on and on and on about how MJ slept with little boys, and touched their pee-pees, and all kinds of comments like that, and then said something like, “Yeah, and then he gets away with it, like KOBIE, and OJ…”
I thought, “Oh my god. This guy is going off. He sounds so racist.”
At first the people up on the stage didn’t hear him, only the people in our immediate vicinity were looking at him, and they (the people up on the stage) made some reference to Kobie, too, and he yelled at me, “See!” and had this look in his eyes of a wild man.
This was one of those situations where you think you know someone, and then all of a sudden, something happens that makes you think they might not be at all who you thought they were. I wanted to crawl up into a hole. It was the most uncomfortable situation I have been in in a long, long time.
Fortunately, right at the tail end of this, Eric and James said, “We’re going now.”
I’ll join you,” I said. And I got the hell out of Dodge.