congraduations

To our niece's son, who just graduated from high school. (He's going to Case Western in the fall.) (He's planning on being an engineer, like all three of his uncles.) (But not like his parents, who are an accounting executive and a psychologist.) This is the grand-nephew whose birth announcement was one of my first LJ posts, so that's how you measure time passing.

Mom, as is her wont, threw a party to celebrate. This was not the typical family holiday party. For one thing, she hired a local taco vendor that does catering, and they set up their portable grill on the back porch, where they made fresh tortillas on the spot and sizzled up little carne asada, pollo, or carnitas tacos to order for no extra charge. Very tasty. I didn't have to seek out any dinner before heading off to the concert I was reviewing ... more on that later.

Another thing she rented was a karaoke machine. This was my first close-up encounter with one of these. Judging from the songs that other guests, mostly younger, were singing, there wouldn't be anything on it that I knew, but someone showed me the massive catalog of the contents, and sure enough, there were. Later B. commandeered it and sang a few show tunes like "Anything Goes" and "Cabaret", but in the meantime I looked up a few of my favorite popular-music bands and found that exactly one of them had exactly one song in the catalog. It was "All Around My Hat" by Steeleye Span. I thought I could sing that, so I gave it a try. I had the usual amateur's difficulty of matching my pitch to an actual backing track, but I only sang about half the song, spending the other half arguing with the cheat screen's terrible mistranscriptions of the lyrics.
But on the catalog's "new additions" list I found something that B. and I could do as a duet. It was "We Don't Talk About Bruno." That was fun. That went well. I'd do that again. Note to self: If ever forcibly dragged up to a karaoke machine, demand an appropriate duet partner and sing "We Don't Talk About Bruno."