Doin' Da Butt

This past Saturday night, Phoebe arranged a trip to a roller-skating rink. Upstairs, it had a bowling alley, bar, and karaoke, hence one-upping one of my other favorite locations. Also, because it was the weekend before Halloween, everyone wore costumes. My favorites were a LiteBrite and a Nevernude from Arrested Development.

Before going roller-skating, I wondered whether I would still be any good at it. When I went ice skating last year, I thought it would come back to me easily, but instead proved difficult and almost disastrous. Fortunately, perhaps unfortunately actually, my ability to roller-skating has not vanished over the past decade. I quickly whipped around the rink with no problems for about 40 laps before I found it sort of dull. Thankfully, there was an alternative activity, so I herded people upstairs to the bar. After a couple of drinks, I came back down to skate and on my first lap around I totally fell face-first onto the rink. Finally, roller-skating was now a challenge and fun again.

Also, if you think the karaoke went ignored, you are clearly not a loyal reader. Stacy and I searched for a duet, ultimately choosing “Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.” Though I have fond memories of performing it with Betsy in the privacy of our own rooms, I had forgotten how ridiculously repetitive it is. As I sang Elton John’s lyrics, I found myself having to sing the line “Don’t go breaking my heart” a whopping twenty-six times. That’s a lot for a three-minute song. Stacy and I were ready to put the song out of its misery, but it kept going. I’d sing, “Don’t go breaking my heart” and she would respond, just as genuinely as the last nine times,“I won’t go breaking your heart.” It was like I were deaf, and unable to hear her response, I just kept repeating the same sentence.

Clearly, that wasn’t the best performance of the night. Heck, the best performance of the night didn’t even go to the, let me be cautious about how I say this, seemingly homeless person (maybe it was a costume!) who chose Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” in honor of Halloween then demonstrated ey didn’t know the lyrics. With karaoke, that’s generally all right since they provide the lyrics, but if you both don’t the lyrics and cannot read, that poses a whole new set of problems. For the 5+ minutes, the potentially homeless karaoke performer occasionally spoke the few lyrics he knew then filled the remaining time by dancing like a zombie from the song’s video. The audience was pretty forgiving of the situation and danced right along with him.

No, the best performance was by the KJ herself. She sang a song previously unknown to me called “Da Butt.” Check out the video here:

During the duration, I couldn’t stop laughing at the song’s absurdity. With lyrics like “Hey, sexy sexy, ain’t nothing wrong if you wanna do da butt all night long,” I figured it was pretty blatantly about anal sex. Subsequent research taught me, however, that “Da Butt” was considered a dance move in its day, hence “Doin’ Da Butt” is not much different than doin’ the locomotion or doin’ the Macarena. Except that Da Butt involves shaking one’s ass – and nothing more.

I apologize to “Da Butt”: it is not blatantly about anal sex as I had suspected. No, it is a song about anal sex that masquerades as a dance craze, which is pretty awesome and, naturally, makes it one of my new favorite songs.