Karaoke Strip Tease

Last night was possibly one of the most entertaining nights that I have had since I arrived in Florence. We found out about this club called the Jazz Club that’s right downtown a few blocks from the Duomo. We thought it would be a very chill, relaxing atmosphere where we could go have some drinks and listen to jazz. And we probably would have been right if we had gone on any night other than Thursday. Thursdays at the Jazz Club, it turns out, are karaoke nights. Yes, I kid you not; I ended up in an Italian karaoke bar last night. It really wasn’t that crowded…imagine that…and there was one couple that we met there that happened to be studying abroad through Syracuse, so they spoke English too. It was weird because listening to the music in the karaoke bar has been the largest concentration of Italian music that I have heard since I got here. There’s an Italian joke here that the Italian people chose to focus on the arts and therefore they cannot sing or play music. MTV is one of the biggest things here right now…Italians love their MTV. In fact, our host family has three MTV channels. However, on MTV, they mostly play songs in English. The street vendors all have English music playing in their booths, and even my Italian teacher plays American oldies in the background of his class. Italian music just isn’t that big of a thing here. So it was quite strange to hear only Italian music in the bar last night. The only people that were singing songs when we got there were the bar tenders, the owner, the DJ, and two people, a man and a woman who were obviously regulars considering the DJ would call them up by name. So, when we walked in the door, we were a bit of fresh air, so to speak. We didn’t even have our drinks before they tried calling us up on stage. We successfully got them to stop taunting for a while by telling them that we don’t speak Italian. However, Kellen, one of our friends does speak decent Italian, so he told the DJ that if he found a song in English, Christy would sing it, because she sings incredibly. Well, Christy and I had already made an “I’ll go if you go” deal before getting there, which was mistake number one. So, the DJ puts on one of the only English songs he has, Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On and Christy gets pulled up on stage to do a duet with the woman who is a ‘regular’ on karaoke night. It was entertaining, and we have a ton of pictures of Christy’s duet. (Except, then Christy’s camera died, right when the night was getting started) So, Christy gets an encore and the DJ plays Summer Lovin’ and I am pulled up on stage to join, along with Julie, and our friend Chris, because we had to have a male counterpart… And when that song finishes, we still aren’t done because we just haven’t sucked enough. So, the DJ plays MORE Celine Dion, this time he plays I’m Your Lady, possibly one of the hardest songs to sing in the world, and Christy, the woman, and I do an awful rendition and finally get booed off the stage!! So, then more people sing, the night goes on, there’s a bad rendition of New York New York, and our friends from Syracuse get to sing some Beatles (why WE got stuck with Celine Dion, I will never know…) but then, the most amazing moment of the entire night happens. The short, chubby, bald, flamboyantly gay, Italian man who is obviously a regular there, gets up to do three songs in a row, each one getting more raunchy than the last, until finally he is doing a strip tease to the point of having his pants unzipped and his skin tight shirt somewhere in the audience, with his hairy chest exposed. I really thought I was going to pee in my pants I was laughing so hard. However, he was taking it so seriously, and he had every move obviously choreographed perfectly, even down to the point of sitting on top of the piano with his legs crossed… Hands down, best thing I have ever seen in Italy thus far!!!!