This was a pretty entertaining weekend, which is nice, because I�ve come not to expect too much from weekends. They�ve been looking pretty much like weekdays only with T ball and bad TV.

But Saturday we went to the open mike that our friend organized. He bailed out on our one and only rehearsal on Friday, so I did not play, although in retrospect, I could have played a Kreutzer etude a la Jack Benny and would have received wild applause. Still, I hate sucking. But maybe next time.

The event was held in what looked to be the staff lounge at a catering business. There were some fire escape stairs heading up to god knows where in the middle of the room and one wall appeared to be a heavy metal door that slid open into the kitchen. We got there a few minutes late, having overindulged on post-Bastille Day French food beforehand. We got out of the car and noticed a woman of about 40 dressed like a 20 year old in too-tight jeans and a belly-baring halter top standing near the building�s wall. She had her hand to her ear and a piece of paper in her hand and appeared to be trying to sing something. We walked around by the sidewalk to avoid her and headed back through the kitchen to a tiny room packed with a good 60 or 70 people. It was an odd crowd. Most people looked to be around my age, on one side of 40 or another. But almost all of them were dressed like college students (or, rather, like college students with more disposable income than most college students have). The fact that they were holding plastic cups of beer from a keg in the hall added to the aging college student atmosphere. There was something a little depressing about it. Soon a guy with a middle-aged belly walked by in a bright orange T-shirt and Chuck Taylors. The T-shirt read, �The older I get, the better I was.� It sort of summed up the whole scene for me. This was going to be a night about anxiety of aging.

The evening finally started up about a half an hour late. The emcee, after endless fiddling with assorted electronic equipment, thanked the catering business that provided the space by way of a parody of the chorus of Alice�s restaurant. He followed it up with an oddly flat version of The Flaming Lips, �Tangerine.�

He was followed by one of the best acts of the night, a man with a shaved head playing Beck and singing in a folkie kind of voice.

Next, a hyper guy wearing a vintage green T, bowling shoes and floppy hair, and talking about a wife and 1 year old at home eating ice cream, played two long classical guitar pieces and was dubbed �The Virtuoso� for the rest of the evening. The audience was impressed and bored at the same time. Someone shouted out, �Who are you?� in a tone that suggested she meant both, �You�re amazing � where did you come from� and also, �what the hell are you doing here?�

The next act was two men with guitars who became the first of many to butcher Springsteen that evening. The less said about the Springsteen slaughter, the better. They followed it up by eviscerating Tom Petty�s �Mary Jane's Last Dance.�

But the most excruciating act of the evening came next. Five women got up and started giggling and milling about. If they had been, I don�t know, twelve this would have been cute. But several of them looked older than I am. It was irritating. The leader, who annoyed me just by standing there, said, �and now it�s time to hear it from the girls. A couple of others stuck their floppy fists in the air and wanly yelled, �Woo! Girl Power!� in what appeared to be the antithesis thereof. Three of them had guitars, one was instrument free, and the fifth had a small keyboard (carried, of course, by a male hanger-on). It took them a half an hour to set up. After endless fiddling with the keyboards amp, the keyboardist played one chord over and over like a metronome. The rest of them sang and played a painfully out of tune rendition of �Breathe� by Anna Nalick. At the end, they all congratulated each other and kissed each other and giggled some more, refusing to leave the stage. We thought they�d play something else after all the build up, but then the keyboardist snapped her fingers and called for �roadies� to take away the keyboard. 15 minutes later, someone else finally came on the stage. I don�t even remember who it was or what he sang, because I was just so happy they were gone.

Unfortunately they were not gone for good. The annoying woman who appeared to be the leader came back to butcher �Me and Bobby McGee� with her mother who totally upstaged her. That was painful enough. After the song was over, she asked if there was a �someone who can play guitar� (i.e., not her daughter) so she could do another song. Fortunately, no one volunteered, so we were spared her rendition of �Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.�

Our friend had one of the best performances of the night playing Springsteen�s �Thunder Road� without doing a Springsteen imitation. We�d already been subjected to several by that point and it was nice to hear someone playing and not doing impressions. Also, his guitar work was fabulous.

We left shortly afterwards. Despite my snide remarks, I did admire the gumption it took for a lot of people who clearly had next to no musical training to get up and lay it all on the table. If the repertoire had been more interesting, it would have been more fun and I would have felt more supportive. There were WAY too many classic rock impressions and bad self-written songs. One of the latter began, �Sometimes I feel�� another began, �I lost my wings today.� Both dissolved into parades of clich�s. They did, however, provide fodder for parody in the car on the way home.

Sunday we had The Girl Next Door and her parents and brother over for dinner which began as something that felt like neighborly obligation but we all ended up having a really good time. It was nice to talk to them outside of yoga classes and random conversations over idling lawn mowers.

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