"once upon a time i was falling in love, but now i'm only falling appppaaartttt"

I heard the absolute worst karaoke rendition of this song. I'm telling you. THE WORST.

My parents and I were on vacation in some random locale, like Florida or Branson, Missouri. I was really young and the place had a karaoke area, and I remember my dad had just started eating beef when most of his life he'd been a vegetarian and I thought the idea of anything with the name "Angus" getting close to my mouth was the grossest thing ever.


The song "Eclipse of the Heart" is like ten minutes long, and the karaoke machine broke while she was singing it, probably a testament to how bad she was singing it, and so they started it up again and she sang it AGAIN.  It was totally off-key, not just like a little off-key like when Becca sings (actually Becca is consistently a third above whatever you're singing if you sing with her, so really, she could be quite successful in a Diana Ross & the Supremes situation), but mind-numbingly I don't even recognize this song anymore off-key.


God, was my 7-maybe-10-year-old self pissed. I thought it to be totally unfair that some older lady who had been making out (people did that?) with her boyfriend (a concept I thought was only possible in movies-- because even now, it seems pretty statistically improbable for two people to like each other to that extent at the same time...) for like 6 minutes straight prior to ruining this song for me could just go up and sing karaoke when she was clearly insane. Why didn't those people stop her?

So of course, I did what any youth would do. I went up and sang a Savage Garden song. Except that guys sing an octave lower than girls and I got all confused so I sang the song like 2 octaves higher than the original Savage Garden guys. Remember, this was the 90s, and Savage Garden was cool. So then, they felt all bad for me and decided to make the next song I sang, "My Heart Will Go On," a few steps lower. Consequently, it was too low for me to sing comfortably and I was really uncomfortable about it.

It was then, that I realized, it didn't matter that that girl RUINED such a great song, because somebody loved her.


I never got my shining karaoke moment, at least not that night. A few years later, my family would go to Tony Roma's on Karaoke Tuesday (or Thursday or Friday or something,) and I would sing "The Greatest Love of All" by Whitney Houston to the appreciation of a happy mostly tipsy audience.

I thought they were taking me seriously, but people just like to watch little kids sing.