Current mood:	Musical
Current music:	Amateur Singing

My new Karaoke home at Trilogy
I e-mailed a few folks about this place, but in case I missed anybody who might be interested:

Two weeks ago, Val put the word out about a swing dance at a place called Trilogy, and at the last minute I decided to look up directions and check it out.  Turns out, the place is only about 10-15 minutes away from where I live, so I headed out in a comfortable t-shirt and black jeans to dance.  When I got there, I felt a bit underdressed, but the hostess in the foyer had a big smile on her face and let me know where the dance was.  I passed a bar on the right on my way to the bar with swing, and heard the unmistakable sound of amateur singing!  Throughout the night, I split my attention and basically would put a song in the rota at karaoke, dance a few songs, come back and sing, put in a new song and repeat.  Great crowd, great book, nice place!  Well, they do a dance once a month, but it turns out that karaoke is weekly, so I went back last week just to sing and had a great time!  I even got invited over to join a table of regulars (apparently artists and artists' reps who own and run a gallery) and was even invited to a Christmas party they're throwing that the K.J. will be performing at.

My past karaoke experiences have usually been kind of crowded, smoke-filled bars where you're lucky if you can sing two songs in a night while sitting through a lot of drunken singers who don't know anything but the chorus and they sing that off-time too, or it's been eXpress karaoke, which is nice, but also very closed off in a little room with friends that can get hot and uncomfortable sometimes and which has a limited English-language selection of songs, plus the place is far away for me and I couldn't just go there casually on my own and enjoy an evening.  Trilogy is a very clean, nicely designed bar with some nice if a bit expensive, menu items available if I want to eat and sing.  Their karaoke has a huge song book (sadly only arranged by artist, but the K.J. is good for helping you out if you don't know who sang what or even what the actual name of a song is).  They also have a second book that is just songs from stage shows and movies, but I haven't looked through that one yet and can't really tell you how good a selection it has.  Still, a good sign for those folks that dig the musical theatre karaoke.  The crowd is a little bit of an older crowd (probably a median age of 45), and the musical tastes so far seem to run to Sinatra, Elvis, the Beatles, Ray Charles, the Bangles, the Beegees, Earth Wind and Fire, and the Monkees.  It also seems, from the two times I've been there, that many folks have their "regular" songs that they sing just about weekly, which might not be great in the long run for me, but it does mean that they're confident in what they're singing and the majority sings pretty well with a few very good stand-out folks, so even if there's a higher slow-to-fast ratio than at some other places, at least the quality of singing tends to be better all-around.

If you're interested in checking the place out, you can get info and directions here: http://www.trilogydining.net/
Karaoke starts at arround 7:30pm or 8pm (depending on set-up) and goes until about 11:30, so it isn't too terribly late a night.  If you are under 21, you might want to call first, because even though I wasn't carded at the door, it is mostly a bar and I don't know what their policy is regaurding the under-21 set.

I don't figure this place is for everybody, but I'm really loving it so far, and I'm planning to be a regular.  If you're interested and want to come out, let me know so I know what sized table to sit at.