The Bobcaygeon Karaoke Incident

This is a little out of order, it fits back with the Toronto stories, but I just had to catch myself up and make sure I told you about this one, before I forgot...

Labour day long weekend in Toronto spells A-I-R-S-H-O-W. Fine if you’re an ‘Anorak’ and you like sitting around in the cold and wet (in your anorak) inhaling jet fuel all morbidly waiting for something to crash – but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Where T and T live, it means a weekend of ‘CROOOOOAAAHHHH’ as jets fly overhead and rattle the windowpanes.

Sticking around in Toronto was not an option so we hit the open road in the Honda (incidentally the long lost Canadian twin of my own black Honda), in search of small town adventure. We were off to paint the town Beige! T had presented me with some options of where we could go, but as I hadn’t heard of any of them, I asked her husband (also T) to decide. He chose, Bobcaygeon.

Bobcaygeon is a little town in the Kawartha Lakes region of east-central Ontario and the name of a single by Canadian band, the Tragically Hip. Although I’d never heard either reference, T+T assured me that Candians all know the song Bobcaygeon and so it would be a quirky place for us to visit – like saying you’ve actually been to Bonnie Doon.

It rained most of the way there, and most of our first afternoon. We secured lodgings with Joyce, who could have been the fifth Golden Girl, a lovely Canadian lady who’d lived at the little inn on the edge of the lake her whole life. Her parents had owned it before her and Joyce, as the name might foretell, was no longer a girl.

We whiled away our rainy afternoon eating butter cakes (deliciously deadly), and deep fried pickle (not so delicious) at an unremarkable sports bar in the main street. On Joyce’s advice we enjoyed a delicious meal at the local Chinese and took a stroll around the village after dinner.

In the space of five minutes, we saw, not one but two shooting stars right in the main street of Bobcaygeon - the first I’d seen in 13 years. Is that because since then I’ve lived in cities, or because I don’t bother to look at the stars anymore, like I did when I was wide-eyed and 17?

We toyed with the idea of calling it a night, but decided instead to head to the another inn which had a bar and some pools tables for a quick drink and a few frames. Lets just say, it’s lucky we weren’t playing those uniquely Australian pool rules where you have to run around the table with your pants around your ankles, or that might have happened to me while I was playing T.

The pool table seemed to work fine, while we were playing. Tenille exhibited the famous spider pool stance. A body shape so angular and sculptural, that her husband wrote a poem about it. After we’d finished playing and we decided to let the locals have a game, the pool table decided it was swallow the balls and not release them. There was much jiggling and rocking of the pool table, T extracted half a kilo of chalk squares, but still the balls wouldn’t release.

At about the same time a large group of girls who would have been 19 top end, took over the bar. What had been a quiet local drinking hole in a sleepy fishing town was suddenly transformed into a bad surburban nightclub, complete with bad modern R’n’B hits.

Where there are young, stupid drunk girls – young, stupid, drunk, opportunistic boys soon follow. It didn’t take long before the small bar was run of its feet quite literally. The barmaid was in a complete flap and an assortment of random helpers tried to restock the fridges in the dinky little bar faster than they were being emptied. And then somebody switched on the Karaoke machine.

We hadn’t even noticed they had one. But the girlies did. And so began an hour or more of painful modern R’n’B hits sung badly and with no performance. The secret to karaoke is that you actually have to know the words to what you’re singing or most people can’t actually sing and keep up with the bouncy ball.


We’d had a few drinks and T and I decided we wanted to sing something. But the young kids had decided they had a ‘closed shop’ on the Karaoke machine. Annoyed, we persisted in trying to win over the girlies to let us sing one song, but they kept insisting that they were singing the next song on this CD etc. It was painful to listen to as Karaoke generally is. And then they made the fatal mistake of playing, Rapper, Vanilla Ice’s 1990 hit, Ice Ice Baby. These kids weren’t even born when this song topped the charts and brought hip hop to a mainstream worldwide audience – they had heard it though and were trying to sing along, but they didn’t know the rap.

They’d pushed us too far, and watching them butchering what should have been a classic Karaoke moment, was too much to bear. T and I barged to the microphones and I said, “I actually know this song” and grabbed the microphone out of some kid’s hand and started rapping. I’ve always had a great memory for obscure and useless details (that never extended to the periodic table of elements unfortunately) but I did remember all the words.

With crowd pleasing 1990s hip hop moves T and I belted out,

To the extreme I rock a mic like a vandal
Light up a stage and wax a chump like a candle
Dance go rush to the speaker that booms
I'm killing your brain like a poisonous mushroom
Deadly when I play a dope melody
Anything less than the best is a felony
Love it or leave it you better gain weight
You better hit bull's eye the kid don't play
If there was a problem yo I'll solve it
Check out the hook while my DJ revolves it

And so we continued to the end of the song. The young kids had stopped their yahooing and were actually getting in to T and my rap, dancing along. When we finished, there was much applause and “That was really awesome”. Little did they know that while they were busy being conceived I’d been rapping along to that one at the year 7 disco.

After that, getting a hold of the mike for another powerful duet, this time of Gloria Gaynor’s “I will survive” complete with ‘hot hot hot’ disco moves was not so difficult. We’d won over the rude, badly dressed, talentless kids with our intimate knowledge of early 90s hip hop. Because everything old is someday cool again.