Karaoke with Ken: AALL Annual Event

Lisa (my wife) and I left the Hyatt Regency for Brando’s Speakeasy a little after 8 PM on Sunday evening, to be sure we’d be there to welcome the other participants. To our surprise, upon our arrival we found that the door was locked and a handwritten sign said simply, “Closed Today!” When our initial shock subsided, I tweeted out a note that we were returning to the hotel to regroup and consider alternative plans. I also asked Kate Hagan, AALL’s Executive Director, to post a note in the conference app, and Cara Schillinger kindly did so a little while later.

Lisa had left a voice message with the bar’s owner, and after concluding that there was no alternative venue available, we decided to salvage the evening by joining CALL for its trivia night at Timothy O’Toole’s. Debbie Ginsberg, Julie Prabarja, and their colleagues were very accommodating. I joined Debbie’s team while Lisa found a stool at the bar, and Julie kindly asked the bar manager whether they could bring in the karaoke DJ. Ultimately he could not make it. The trivia crowd of about 120 was four times the size they were expecting, and it was a raucous and fun time.

During the evening Ron Wheeler put me in touch with the manager at Brando’s and he explained that a water pipe had burst that day and flooded the bar. He assure me that they would reopen on Monday and we planned accordingly.

Photo courtesy Corie Dugas

With Thomson Reuters promising “Librarian Idol” for the customer appreciation event, it looked like karaoke would be the order of the evening. After I invited Cindy Bassett to dance while Bonnie Shucha rocked the house, Lisa and I returned to Brando’s. Later in the evening we were joined by about 35 of our gang, making the evening a success despite the smaller than usual turnout. All-in-all, a great two evenings thanks to all the folks I mentioned above and many more!

Courtesy of Heather Kushnerick, here’s a shot of Lisa and me, with Lisa singing harmony on the choruses of “Hallelujah.”

Please plan on joining us in Austin next year!

In July AALL holds its annual meeting and conference in the Second City, returning to Chicago for the first time since before I joined in 1988. The conference hotel is the Hyatt Regency Chicago, which is large enough to host the programs, meetings, and exhibit space! For this year’s karaoke excitement, we’ll be heading to Brando’s Speakeasy at 343 S. Dearborn Street on Sunday, July 17^th.

Brando’s has a karaoke bar with an in-wall touchscreen for finding and selecting your song, just inside the Dearborn Street entrance. The management is reserving the tables near the karaoke stage for us. The Plymouth Court side of the restaurant offers a lounge for those who want a brief respite from karaoke.

Brando’s is about a twenty-minute walk or a brief cab/Uber ride from the Hyatt. The singing kicks off at 9 P.M., so please make plans to join us. Be sure to add CS-SIS Karaoke with Ken to your calendar in the conference app!

With just under three weeks until this year’s CS-SIS Karaoke with Ken event, let’s talk about the venues. This year will mark the second time since the official designation as an SIS sponsored social event that we will return to a venue. We last visited McGillin’s Olde Ale House on July 24, 2011 when AALL met in Philadelphia four years ago. It marks the first time that both visits will have been as a sponsored event. In 1999, prior to its official status, and again 2009 we sang at Cafe Japone near Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. At the last visit we overflowed the small establishment with 75 attendees, spilling out into the sidewalk. Unfortunately, Cafe Japone has closed and we cannot return there in 2019!

McGillin’s was a loud venue, with conversation and music already blaring when we arrived. So it took a few minutes extra to get things started. Singers, bring your boombox larynx and audience, be alert to hear our folks sing their hearts out!

Other venues for this event have included Kikugawa at Riverplace in Minneapolis, 2001. There Tory Trotta thrilled the crowd with her rendition of “Leader of the Pack.” Kikugawa also has since closed. In 2002 in Orlando we visited the Lucky Leprechaun Irish Pub on International Drive. This was the only time we heard our members perform a rousing rendition of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” Perhaps it’s time for a repeat performance!

In 2003, despite my bad back, we made it to Jack’s Roadhouse in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle. Ten years later on our return visit to the Emerald City we traveled to the Hula Hula Tiki Bar, with as much kitsch in the decor as you would expect. But the beverages and the playlist were great! 2004 in Boston found us at another Japanese restaurant where the karaoke videos included leaping dolphins! On our first visit to San Antonio in the following year Tory had found us Suds and Songs, a bar in the mall that featured our first experience with a DJ loading the slections from his computer’s hard drive.

St. Louis in 2006 was most notable for the inability of the taxi drivers to find the place we were meeting. In New Orleans, 2007, we visited the world famous Cat’s Meow on Bourbon Street, where the performance queue takes twice as long to move through because the D.J.s sing every other song. In 2008 we were in Portland at a dive bar, the name of which I don’t recall, and as noted above we were back at Cafe Japone in ’09. Armida’s TexMex was our 2010 Denver host, and of course McGillin’s in ’11. Boston the following year found us at the Elephhant and Castle in Boston, and with Seattle in 2013 and The Republic of Texas last year for our return visit to San Antonio, you have the list. One of our favorite performers in the past few years has been Jackie Prentiss, who channels a mean Lady Gaga.

So back to the question: What does make a good karaoke venue. In my mind, the best ones have this:

1. Location close to the meeting hotels.
2. Ample seating.
3. A DJ with a friendly attitude, a killer playlist, and fast access to the songs.
4. Seating that lets us hang out with friends and mingle with each other to make new ones.
5. Tasty beverages, whether soft or hard.

Hope to see you in a few weeks!

Beginning with the 1997 meeting in Baltimore a small group had found a karaoke bar and listened to at least one of the group attempt a song or two. In 2001 the event became officially sponsored by the Computing Services Special Interest Section and there were 25 in attendance, several of whom sang their own rendition of familiar songs. For those of you not familiar with karaoke, in Japanese it means “without orchestra,” or at least that is what web sites and urban legend say.

Of course, you can check out the Wikipedia entry. The singer reviews the venue’s selection list, picks out the song he or she wants to attempt, and waits for the turn to play pop, Broadway musical, or opera star while the music and lyrics are provided by a karaoke machine. Well, maybe not opera. Without consulting any reference sources beyond my own memory, I can tell you the concept first became popular in the U.S. in the 1980′s, faded for a little while, and has been enjoying a resurgence here since 1994. If you need a primer, rent the video of “Duets,” the 2000 movie starring Huey Lewis and Gwyneth Paltrow. The pair teamed up on “Baby Let’s Cruise,” earlier a hit for Smoky Robinson as “Cruisin.” But one need not be as talented as that star duo. Karaoke singers range from the truly great, who regularly enter and win contests; to the truly awful, who enjoy singing in front of an audience and who equally enjoy an audience who is relaxed – or slightly intoxicated – enough to not object to any and all comers. In addition to Ken Hirsh, previous AALL singers have included Tori Trotta and George Pike, along with many others. The 2009 excursion to Cafe Japone in Washington, D.C. brought out more than 75 attendees, and many new singers in the group.  We had a slightly smaller group but just as much fun in Denver in 2010.

[Reposted to engage Twitter cards]