MY KARAOKE QUEEN

I'm sitting here ... staring at this page and trying to decide what to write about.

There's a banner at the top of this page for someone else's diary that starts out "I am 20 and my parents are dead."

Maybe it's just me, but I really really REALLY don't want to click on that banner. When the most important thing you have to tell me is that your parents are dead, I get the eerie feeling our relationship has nowhere else to go but down at that point.

Once again ... maybe it's just me.

I received my Super Karaoke machine yesterday from the lovely folks at UPS.

Naturally, ordering a Super Karaoke machine, I was expecting the thing to have a cape and X-ray vision.

Imagine my disappointment when it looked like every other DVD player in existence.

But it IS cool. I ordered three discs with it and between the three discs there's 1,350 songs to choose from.

So I only have to lug an extra three discs with me everywhere I go for Karaoke parties.

Last night when the Mrs and the boy returned home from a day of whatever the hell they do all day, I proudly stood in the middle of the den, waving my arms toward the Super Karaoke machine like a puffy and bloated Vanna White.

The Mrs. was less than impressed.

"Have you ever even SANG karaoke?" I asked her.

"No," she sniffed. "And I don't want to."

Now, my wife ... she loooooves the singing. If you present her with the opportunity to belt out a song, nine times out of ten she'll take the opportunity and run with it like a horse on steroids.

But she was skeptical about the Super Karaoke. Like it would somehow finagle a credit card number out of her and go charge thousands of dollars worth of fancy meals on her.

Finally, while perusing the songbooks that came with it, I said "Ooooo, hon! They've got 'Tomorrow'."

A little known fact: My wife played Annie in the musical of the same name.

Granted, it was a high school production that only about 35 people showed up to watch. But the gal looooooves her "Annie".

Her ears perked up.

"Tomorrow?" she asked, head tilting like a dog hearing a tin whistle from a distance. "As in 'The sun will come out tomorrow'?"

"Uh huh," I said. "Wanna give it a tr--"

She snatched the microphone out of my hand.

"Fire that bitch up," she growled.

In less than a minute, I had created the Super Karaoke Whore.

She had a songbook in her hand, leafing through it frantically before she finally gave up on the songbook and just started punching numbers into the remote at random until they landed on something she felt like singing.

I was treated to renditions of "The Brady Bunch Theme", "Hey Jude", "I Love Rock and Roll", "Crazy" and about 30 other songs.

At 11:00 last night as I went to bed, she was whispering her Karaoke so as to not wake up Andrew.

I just had to go roust her out of bed where she admitted she stayed up until 12:30 singing last night.

Her throat's sore this morning.

Which is a good sign.

Because ... and I guess I should have pointed this out already ... my wife has the singing voice of a pregnant cow having its udders sawed off with a rusty chainsaw.

She squawks and honks out lyrics that leave dogs howling in our front yard, wanting to tear apart whatever's in the house making that tremendous racket.

I'm used to this off-key extravaganza, having dealt with it for the better part of 18 years now.

But the neighbors?

They're hanging ropes in trees this morning with my wife's name on them.

I'm deejaying a fund raiser tonight for a local politician.

I've been told there will be upwards of 500 locally influential people at the event.

I'm thinking about wearing a suit made solely of my business cards.

With a jock strap underneath.

Yeaaaah.

That'll drum up the business quickly.

Heard from my old neighbor Mattie Gee this weekend who had a brilliant idea for my job.

I need to start videotaping people doing Karaoke and then we'll assemble the worst Karaoke singers on one disc and quietly sell the disc.

While this is well and good and should make us millionaires like the guys from Bum Fights, I'm also going the cheap and more legal route of making cash by taking the camcorder to all my parties and videotaping everyone who does Karaoke and then offering to sell them a videotape of their performance for $10/pop.

In addition, I'm taking my CD burner and will record each of them and they can buy a CD of everyone's songs for $10/pop.

Both of these are perfectly legal ways to make extra money at parties.

Whereas the assembling of the worst Karaoke singers on DVD may get me in trouble.

I know, I know ... get 'em to sign a waiver authorizing me to use their performance elsewhere.

It's just ... I feel bad making money off people's tone-deaf renditions of Hank Williams songs.

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Did that sound as sincere as I was trying to make it sound?

Good.

Because that was the biggest amount of horseshit that I've ever thrown out to you guys.