Column:

Friesen: karaoke maestro, drunk

By Dan Friesen

Published April 29, 2008

Children, your intrepid columnist had a rare joy this weekend. He experienced the type of thing that one can only enjoy once a year. Thursday was my birthday.

To celebrate, I went out to Deja Vu on Thursday to see fellow columnist Ryan Beck do some stand-up, and was impressed not only by Ryan’s decent performance, but also by how many dudes approached me for cigarettes. I swear to God I was like a magnet for cheap cigarette-mooches.

I had a good enough time, but the real hoorah came on Friday when a select group of friends and I went out to Peppers to do some karaoke. I don’t mind telling you, I killed.

There are only a choice few things I can confidently say I’m good at in life. I’m good at predicting who’s going to be voted out on each episode of “Survivor.” I’m good at cooking RavioliOs. I’m good at finding free pornographic clips longer than a minute online. But, my prowess in these fields pales in comparison to my skill on the mic.

I belong to the school of karaoke that believes that karaoke is not about singing. It is about drinking, about freaking out, and, in its purest form, it’s about really creeping out a room full of people. There is no delight like singing Avril Lavigne’s “Complicated” in front of a crowd of fifty-plus “good ol’ boys.” On Friday, I freaked out the crowd with Kenny Rogers’ “Coward of the County.” If there’s a more commercially successful song about gang-rape, I’ve never heard it.

But, I’m not here to talk about how I am the golden god of karaoke; I’m here to talk about an article in our beloved Maneater that I read this weekend. In it, a study of binge drinking is discussed. There were a great many revelations in the article, like this doozy: “(Psychology professor Kenneth) Sher said this is not an MU-specific issue because the findings relate campuses across the country.” I think that “relate” is not the best verb here, but more than that, this is just a silly sentence. It’s relies on a presupposition that someone would assume that binge drinking is a uniquely Columbian phenomenon.

The only real thing that’s shocking to me is this statistic: 80 percent of participants in the study reported using some alcoholic beverage to celebrate their 21st birthday. This is a very alarming statistic, because if these statistics can be extrapolated to mean anything, that means that 20 percent of the campus population is comprised of square weirdos. What kind of a dick doesn’t drink on their 21st birthday? What kind of a dick doesn’t drink on their 18th birthday?

There’s only one other thing that stuck out to me, the name of the Director of the Wellness Resource Center: Kim Dude. How the hell are you going to convince people not to binge drink when your name is “dude?”

Dude warned that it is especially “risky” to be over a .06 percent blood alcohol content, which I think is a little alarmist. Just last week, a man in Michigan showed up for jury duty with a .24 percent BAC. Sure, he got thrown off the jury, but he had to have got there somehow. It’s not like he got pulled over on the way to the courthouse. I don’t know my exact BAC on Friday night, but rest assured that it was over .06, and the only thing I was risking was blowing the minds of approximately 30 equally drunk karaoke bar patrons. Odds are that I would do that sober too, but God willing, I will never know that for sure.