Searching For My Lost Shaker Of Salt

I am going to apologize now for teh spacing. Blogger won't let me key "enter" to space down. Last night Beloved and I were talking about music, while we listened to the radio in our room, and it brought back a funny story that I wanted to share with you.

In our town there is a piano bar, which is an excellent little place to go if you like music or karaoke, or watching people make complete fools of themselves in public. I ought to explain how ours works, for the record, so if you’ve been to one of these, bear with me...

It’s a basic bar, where there are a lot of tables, and a bar on one end of a very long room. All the tables, however, face a platform on one side of the room, where there are two grand pianos and a trap set in between them. At a certain time in the evening, two pianists and a drummer come to the platform and do a "show". During the show they sing songs and play their pianos and encourage all the drunk people watching to sing along. They tell little jokes, and bring people with birthdays or anniversaries, or ones that are particularly good looking or drunk, up to the platform and tease them, make them sing songs, or have them help tell a lewd joke. They also take requests, which you put in a little fish bowl with a few dollars on top of the piano. [I’ve learned, the larger the tip, the more likely your song gets played.]

At our Piano Bar they sing all sorts of songs. There are of course, the standards, like "Boardwalk" or that "If you like Pina Coladas" song...but they also play songs like "Wonderwall" by Oasis or "Heart Shaped Box" by Nirvana. I’ve even seen "Material Girl" by Madonna, which was fabulous, as the person singing it was a male. Really, there isn’t much they won’t play.

The first time Beloved ever came to the Piano Bar with me, it was for a friend of her’s birthday [I despise the girl, but hey - its beer and singing, right?]. we got there at about 7pm, which is quite early, but it gets full really fast, so its better to get a seat. We ordered a pizza and some beer [well, Beloved had Royal Flushes, I had beer] and she chatted her friends up, and I got drunk because I didn’t want to talk to anyone and it was 2 for 1, so why not, right?

I got all dressed up for the occasion, and it was a lot of fun for me. Partly because her friends were horrified, and partly because I got a lot of compliments, including one from a very attractive young lady who was waiting in line in the bathroom with me. [she was lovely, and had a scratchy Janis Joplin-esque voice that was wonderful.] So - my outfit- I had gone vintage shopping and found some men’s dress trousers in grey that were a little flared in the leg, I assume from the seventies, but they were really nice. I also found a lovely navy-blue necktie from Sears Roebuck circa 1953 *with the tag still on* and a mens grey hat similar to the ones Frank Sinatra used to wear. I put on a white ribbed men’s undershirt and the rest of the ensemble, straitened my hair as flat as can be, and then slicked it back under my hat. I put on a girly a face I could [beautiful eyeliner and lip gloss...] and my black boots. It was a nice effect. But like I said, I think her friends were horrified to see me in men’s clothes. It gave me a good laugh.

So, we got lit, and then the show started. They sang a lot, and with most bars that have these, there are add in lines to the songs as you sing along [Think something similar to a Rocky Horror Picture Show viewing] Well, we had done this before, in other clubs we had been to in another neighboring state, so Beloved thought we were all set.

Here’s the thing. Most times, no one sings along, or not loud enough to be noticed. We were all completely pissed and singing *very* loudly which the piano guys like, and so they were doing a lot of our requests, because we were having a very good time. Of course, time came for them to do the classic piano bar song, "Magaritaville" by Jimmy Buffet. This is one that gets everyone going.

Like I said, we’d done this before, so we knew the add ins. Well, we had forgotten we went to a rather rowdy karaoke bar out of state, and here we are in the middle of the bible belt, and the add in had been changed, just a little. You may or may not know it...the line generally goes (around here)

Wasting away again in margaritaville...
Searching for my lost shaker of salt...

Then we add in "Where’s my salt, not the pepper, but the salt" [or so we learned]

So if you can imagine, here we are, having instructed our friends on the proper line to the song, and when the insert comes, we shout, at the top of our drunken lungs:

"Where’s the salt, where’s my mother f*cking salt?"

Everyone in the bar turned to look at us. The piano player actually stopped, laughed and made a joke, teased us about letting loose on our friends birthday, thanked us for at least singing along, sent us a round of drinks, and went back to the song after instructing us on the "G" rated version of the insert.

Looking back, I laugh when I think of it every time. The look on that poor man’s face? Priceless.