Swan Song

Last night, turned out to be an awesome evening! It started at my old varsity mate and ex-colleague Simon’s place. He was holding a small, shindig to celebrate his birthday. It was cool because I got to meet up with a lot of old mates and ex-work colleagues whom I have not seen since my return to the Cape.

The evening started off slowly. Since I’m a complete light-weight when it comes to consuming alcohol and don’t really drink, Simon was kind enough to whip me up a cappuccino with his cool, Breville espresso machine. I must say that he has gotten it down to a fine art. Using the Origin, Ethiopian, Yirgacheffe blend I gave him, he made a cappuccino that was on par with many of the leading coffee spots in Cape Town.

Buzzing with caffeine, I needed an outlet for the excess energy and with the Play Station 3 hooked up, some Sing Star and hard liquor going around, you could sense that some down right, craziness was about to get on. Sing Star can be described as Karaoke on steroids, where the Play Station console actually measures your tone, timing etc. It even has a party mode option where you can “battle” out songs with your friends.

The first time I grabbed the mic, my competitor turned out to be none other than the house champ himself, Simon. Now, I’ve never been into Karaoke and have actually never, really had any desire to try it out. Strange, seeing that my brothers and sisters in the East have built a billion dollar industry around people publicly humiliating themselves…Surprisingly I didn’t do too badly, we chose to do a song we both knew by The Killers; and I think in the end I only lost by a mere 100 points. Rabbi made the comment that it’s in my heritage to do well…which is probably true, judging by my relatively good performance.

With my confidence on the up, I became a lot more open to the idea and actually had a heck of a lot of fun! I found the only problem was that the girls had the upper hand during the evening. Because in the original Song Star title, it seemed that most songs had such high notes that the only way that the men could compete, was if they were trained to sing falsetto, or lop their testicles off! Luckily, there were some other variations of the title, with some huskier voices, available on hand to even out the playing field.

After leaving Simon’s party, I quickly got cleaned up to meet up with some friends at Karma for what I thought would be a one drink affair. I could not have been more wrong. A large contingent of my friends: Ernst, Lauren, JP, Action Dan, Paul, Xav, Mitch and Kristi had all showed up. Whether independently or together it did not matter, the night was going to be big. Remember how I said I was a complete light weight in the beginning? Well, I was pretty much on my way after only having two shooters, which were dispensed to us by one of Louisa’s very proficient, promotion girls. In my state, I was quick to be on the dance floor throwing some pretty mesmerizing and skillful moves…

This morning; I could definitely feel the effects of the long week, sleep deprivation and the horrendous amount of Jager - two whole shots - had taken it’s toll on me... I was supposed to get up fairly early and meet up with Natalie for morning tea, and at 9:30 am as I enquired to when we were going to meet, it turned out that our times would clash. With that, I thought I’d lie down just a little bit longer…only to wake up again at 1pm…just in time for some Sunday lunch…