If you’ve been in a town long enough you feel like you should know a person of significance at every local business establishment. Door guys and hostesses and managers. Baristas and bartenders and supervisors. Clerks and owners and secret back-alley mystery merchants.
Knowing people of importance can come with a lot of perks, ya know. Like you might go into a place and they immediately recognize you and say something like, ‘hey! good to see you, how you been?’ They could maybe bump you ahead in some kind of line. Maybe you even get some kind of product or service from them on the house. Then maybe when you’re in a position of significance at some other establishment you return the favor in some way. There’s like a whole ecosystem.
You at least wanna have a point of contact at your favorite spots. Which for me historically have been karaoke bars. In my prime I had a guy at every karaoke joint in Boulder. Letting me take as many turns as I wanted, feeding me free drinks, and hyping me up as the Greatest Singer in the City. And I was working for Boulder Yellow Cab, and I’d give them my personal number so their customers always had a quick taxi ride, and maybe at the end of their shift I’d take them home with the meter off.
See, I was part of a real Circle of (Night)Life. Satisfying for everyone involved.
Then I dunno. I stopped driving. Stopped going out so much. And in Boulder there’s such a turnover of people of significance, especially in the last few years when the rent has (rocket sounds). And so many key places have shut their doors. And maybe the whole idea of being out with other human beings in public and cutting sweet deals with them is itself becoming out of fashion.
So after 20+ years in town I was down to one last karaoke contact – Sam at Sushi Zanmai.
I know Sam from the old Burnt Toast open mic days, where we were both regulars. She’s a real everyone-loves-her/life-of-the-party kinda girl who is especially supportive of the artist type. We were even briefly in a poetry performance group together and had a few gigs around town.
Burnt Toast closed eventually and Sam moved on to other scenes, rising up ruthlessly (perhaps) in the local restaurant world, and we fell out of touch for long spells. But even so the bond was formed for good and ready to be called upon whenever necessary.
It payed off in the last couple years when she become the manager and Saturday night karaoke host at Sushi Zanmai. The Sam Charisma made it one of the top karaoke nights in the area – high energy with lively, spit-flying-from-mouth crowds of young and old, packing the small room, and adopting as personal hero any stranger who came to the stage, pitchperfect or otherwise.
Rob and I would stop in every now and then, sometimes to celebrate a successful poetry gig and Sam who is an expert in the Ecosystem of Favors would hook us up with all the things – attention, sake, extra singing slots. She’d hand over the mic to you at the end of the night and say something like “hey Jonny, why don’t you sing Semisonic’s Closing Time’ to take us out.” And you felt like a real resident of a municipality with a real rooty history there and a real geographic and social identity, and the rush from that was as good as nailing the high notes on some classic tune ever could be.
And now she’s leaving town to New Orleans. I don’t know the exact reasons. Maybe every Boulder resident eventually just has their expiration date. Except me it seems. And now I can’t think of anyone else I know at a place anymore. Damn aging, damn economics, damn era, damn entropy.
Maybe she’ll host a karaoke night in Louisiana and I’ll drop in one day and she’ll feed me a free spoonful of gumbo and I’ll sing “Johnny B Good.” But for right now i just want something, anything to stay the same here.
Jonathan Bluebird Montgomery 