There are very few times in life when “Karaoke night,” at a bar can go sour. Usually it is crowded with people too drunk to function on any normal plane of reality. That’s fine. No normal, sober, fully-functioning human would ever try to slur out their favorite Van Halen or Abba track in front of a live audience.
Most people leave that for in front of the mirror at home or in the car driving down the highway at 75 mph and think no one is watching because they are on the highway. Right, and no one is watching you try and pick your nose either.
But bad Karaoke nights are known to happen. When Ashley Simpson sang her own song at the NCAA football national championship game, she got booed off the stage by over 50,000 football fans. In “Rush Hour 2” Chris Tucker had to take the microphone from some guy who was slaughtering “Don’t stop ’til you get enough” in a karaoke bar. Of course, Family Guy takes the cake with the characters rendition of Journey’s “Don’t stop believing,” which is by far the best song to karaoke because it does in fact go “on and on and on and on.”
Much like tornado in Oklahoma, it takes the perfect ingredients to create something that sucks that much. Last Thursday night some guy in Seattle decided to sing Coldplay and it sucked more than an F5 on the Fujita scale.
While Coldplay is not usually the band of choice for Karaoke, it happens. Eventually some guy with too much estrogen that is willing to be the butt-end of every “you know how I know you’re gay,” joke for the rest of his life gets brave. It happens. It’s Thursday night, that same estrogen-heavy guy is feeling good and has probably had a few drinks decides he wants to belt out his favorite Coldplay track – Yellow. It happens.
In Seattle, it happened and it was quickly followed up with assault. That’s correct, assault.
A 21-year-old Seattle woman assaulted a man brave enough to stand up in front of a crowd and belt out, in attempted perfect harmony, the thought-provoking lyrics “Look at the stars / Look how they shine for you / And everything you do / Yeah, they were all yellow.”
While the lyrics might be genius, apparently the woman didn’t appreciate his talent. The bar staff said she decided to tell him he “sucked,” before she bum-rushed the stage and pushed and punched him to get him to stop singing.
Most bar going patrons assume karaoke night will be bad. When faced with a horrible singer they might boo a little, laugh heavily and maybe even shout some things towards the stage.
But assault, that’s a little far. Unfortunately, for the man in this case, it was probably deserved.
Shout out to the guy with a bruised sternum and even more bruised ego. If you plan to serenade any women you might want to pick another track because this one is not your cut. And next time you decide to get on stage and “sing,” your favorite tune, pick one that won’t get your face pancaked in between itself and a woman’s fist.
Now this woman might be a bad barometer. She, according to the Associated Press, “went crazy,” after the bartenders got her to stop beating the tar out of the singer.
“It took three or four of us to hold her down,” bartender Robert Willmette said.
She too, was upset. Someone had slaughtered “yellow” on stage in front of her and just like a dog with a laser pen she continued her rampage out onto the street by throwing punches at the bartender and others.
One problem was one of the others was an off-duty police officer. Patrol officers and detectives arrived at the bar, blocked off the street, and attempted to control the situation which only seemed to fuel the fire that was the woman’s rage.
So like any person unable to act rationally on the same level of reality as the rest of society she head butted the off-duty officer at least twice before the police were able to subdue her. The off-duty officer was treated for his part in the altercation and after treatment for her injuries the woman was booked into the King County jail for investigation of assault and was also held on a warrant issued for a previous theft charge.
Now this might be a tale of one woman’s realization that those 10 shots or eight beers or a couple of cosmopolitans equal complete inebriation but according to bartender notes, she had only a single shot of Jagermeister.
Imagine what would have happened if she’d had two shots.
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