How to Sing Like a Karaoke Goddess

note: not me

I feel like karaoke is a love-it-or-hate it phenomenon. When one of your friends suggests an excursion to your local sing-a-long joint, you're either whipping out your phone to consult your list of personal greatest hits while you run through some vocal warm-ups, or you're diving under the nearest table. There is no in-between. But if you're in the table-diving camp, take heart: it really is fun, if you approach it with the right attitude. And, of course, with a little alcohol.

The first thing I want to tell you is, a great singing voice is NOT a requirement. Karaoke is all about spirit. Yes, there may be (me, my husband, or one of our immediate family) some asshole up at the front of the room making love to the mic and belting out the high notes like an American Idol wannabe. Especially if you live in New York city, where actual professional singer-types have been known to make appearances at karaoke bars on their off-hours and show off. But remember: that person with the pretty respectable singing voice is up there performing out of an insatiable hunger for attention, but you? You're just here to have fun. And here's how you're going to do it.

First rule of karaoke: pick a song everybody else is going to know. Nothing will kill a room faster than a weird, obscure B-side by a band that's barely seen the light of day. People want to keep the party going! Which brings me to my next rule:

No dreary ballads. Not everything you put in has to be up-tempo, but save the slow, swampy tearjerkers for your breakup mix.

And along those same lines, make sure you choose something under the five-minute mark! No matter how much they might like the song in real life, nobody wants to sit through eight minutes of karaoke American Pie, or karaoke Stairway to Heaven, or karaoke Paradise by the Dashboard Light. Not even--and I know some of you will be shaking your heads, but you have to trust me on this one--not even six minutes of Bohemian Rhapsody. (And seriously, even if it weren't six minutes long, nobody should be trying to do Bohemian Rhapsody anyway--it's too. damn. hard. There was only ever one Freddie Mercury. So just don't.)

So, having covered the basics of song selection, we can now move on to the second, and equally important, aspect of creating an awesome karaoke experience: etiquette guidelines.

Number one: don't ever, ever sing over top of somebody else's song. We all put songs in the queue cause we like them and we want to sing them, and the biggest buzz-kill of all is to wait the 20 or 30 minutes for the mic to make its way around to you, only to have some shit-faced frat boy or overly festive bachelorette kill your song by bellowing along with it and drowning you out. If it's not your turn, you can sing along--just don't scream.

Number two: clap! Even if the person who just finished singing sounded like a rooster with a bad sinus infection, you give them applause to show how cool it was that they just got up there and sang. Cause when it's your turn, even if you sound like a rooster with a bad sinus infection, they'll be neighborly and clap for you!

And the final rule, which is also the best rule: make friends. People in karaoke bars are, by their very nature, a little more fun than people in regular bars, cause no matter how seriously you take it, belting out pop songs in front of a room full of total strangers is a pretty silly thing to do. You can't be shy, and you can't be self-conscious, so you might as well strike up a conversation with that group of dudes next to you that keeps putting in Journey songs. It will probably lead to an adventure.

When Light Fixtures Attack

Ingo Maurer's Zettel'z fixture first appeared in my life when, as a starry-eyed design student, I employed it over a French Deco dining table in an imaginary Upper West Side brownstone:

If you're keeping score (I know you are), those are Biedermeier chairs, an Asian-influenced stone console table, Russian Constructivist and turn-of-the-century graphic art, an overscale po-mo dentil molding, and an unremarkable cream rug (which I now know better than to ever put near a dining table, hoooo no). This was during my Mixmaster Phunk phase, if you hadn't guessed.

But the beauty, looseness, spontaneity, and simplicity of this fixture are remarkable: I've adored it for years. Until I had to put one together, that is.

That thing is a BITCH. You have to run each of those little metal rods through the central mesh cylinder by hand, judging the height and angle, correcting misfires, and locking it into place with two diabolically small and slippery rubber stoppers, all while teetering precariously on a step ladder (or kitchen stool, for some people). It takes a LONG TIME. After a couple hours of picking away, I felt reasonably confident I had arranged the rods in a satisfactorily full and firework-like fashion, even though I had a bunch of them left over. Then I put the papers on and realized it was still only halfway full. So, like Sisyphus taking hold of his boulder for another go, I sighed and climbed back up on the stool. Only to ping my client in the face as a rogue rod-stopper went zooming out of my hands.

The only light fixture more painful to put together than the Zettel'Z is the Bocci, which we also did for this same client:

All those tiny floating orbs of dewy light come at an agonizing price, namely hours upon hours of time. For this same (very patient and trusting) client, we did a cluster of six of the five-orb fixtures, to create a fairy-cloud feeling over her dining table. It was very important that the globes not be aligned symmetrically, but instead with subtle variations in height and location, and that is just NOT the kind of thing you can draw up on CAD, you have to look at it in real life, in the real space, with the real fixtures. Which meant that I had to sit with the electricians for hours while one of them held each fixture up--and those bastards are heavy--and the other measured the hanging distance for each orb, slipping it up or down according to my instruction. And that's not counting the time it took them to actually cut the wires, lock them in place, and install all six fixtures.

I left the site for a while to get some lunch, and when I came back I ran into one of the electricians outside. He reared backwards in alarm, making the sign of the cross in front of his face to ward me off, before retreating cautiously into the building, never taking his eyes off me.

That’s called suffering for beauty, my friends. They’re not just talking about high heels.

Analysis Paralysis

After spending all weekend anti-socially planted on my couch, I am finally (finally) moving toward what I think is a good query letter and synopsis. And honestly I think one of the single biggest things I did to get myself there was to STOP reading advice articles on how to do it.

Now, I am not saying not to read the articles at all. I have everything to gain, and everything to learn, from reading them--and I've learned a lot. But at a certain point, I just had to stop, because all I was doing was driving myself in endless circles of "Is it good enough? Did I do this right? Is it ready? Have I edited the MS enough? Am I ready?" Not unlike when my boss's cat gets freaked out by the sight of his own tail, and then attacks it, and then gets confused and gives up, and then three minutes later gets freaked out by it and attacks it again. I found that I was holding my own material up to this magical unattainable standard of the examples given, and the criteria listed, until I had convinced myself that it was so incredibly difficult to write an interesting query that I was never going to actually be able to do it.

So I stopped. And took some deep breaths, and went back to my most recent critique, and wrote another draft. And I think it's pretty good. Maybe not totally there yet, but most definitely moving in the right direction. Part of it was, instead of trying to query my heartfelt story about love and loss and memory like a plot-driven paranormal where stakes are high and danger looms around every corner, I accepted that--as my prized, trusted beta reader pointed out--emotions are plot. And I need to play to my book's strengths, not throw smoke and mirrors at it to try to make it look like something it's not. The smoke and mirrors were adding up to a much less interesting book, anyway.

Well, so this happened.

The best damn wedding in the Hudson Valley. Donuts were eaten, karaoke was sung, the party was thoroughly, thoroughly partied. My dress was pink and puffy, and I felt like a hipster Scarlett O'Hara descending the winding staircase at the venue, holding my billowing skirts out of my way so I wouldn't pitch face-first onto the floor and ruin all that hard work on my makeup. We walked in to "Love and Happiness" and walked out to "Signed, Sealed Delivered" and it was the biggest blast I've ever had in my life. Too bad I only get to do it once.

Is Your Face Supposed to Be Doing That?

I am molting.

A month and a half ago, suddenly horrified by the reality of being 33 years old with baby wrinkles, dry spots, and occasional breakouts, I ran screaming to an Upper East Side dermatologist and dropped an unholy sum on exactly three products. She also wrote me a prescription for Retin-A.

So apparently the way Retin-A works is to induce your skin to shed itself. This is every bit as sexy as it sounds. My skin has been flaking and peeling like a bad paint job. I was kind of secretly hoping that no one else had noticed, until the other day when Allen touched my scaly cheek worriedly and said, "Baby... is your face supposed to be doing that?"

I think those are words nobody ever wants to hear their partner say. Lucky me.