crapaoke: like karaoke, But tolerable
Sometimes, we do things we regret. And occasionally, we keep doing these things. When these regretful things happen over and over again throughout the course of several months, those old feelings of embarrassment and woe soon turn into a sense of calm familiarity. After enough time passes, we identify with our captors and see our behavior as normal, or perhaps just non-sociopathic.

It’s about this time we realize that we’ve been singing karaoke all summer.

Once the disease called karaoke reaches the brain, nothing seems more appropriate than informing the Youngstown community about the soul-changing properties of karaoke; and by soul I mean “the inner spirit of humanity” and not “Motown,” because there’s far too many white people involved in karaoke for legitimate funk to occur.

In Japanese, karaoke means “empty orchestra,” a definition that is hauntingly apt for a people who cram themselves into tiny booths with their friends to sing their worries away in between the harsh days of cram school and piloting giant robots. It wasn’t long ago when I was unaware of this fact, and also lacking the motivation to do a simple 10-second Wikipedia search to discover it. Karaoke was simply something that wasn’t for me, like line dancing, organ meat, and life without crippling debt. But Youngstown has a way of making people do things they would normally never do; after all, from 1972 to 1984, Youngstown took a page from Missouri’s “The Show me State” and was once known as “The Show Me and then Slowly Back Away” city.

Like all new and socially risky adventures, it was drinking that led me to the beautiful siren known as karaoke, and no amount of cotton stuffed in my ears could pull me away or stop me from trying to sound intelligent with references to mythology. And Youngstown has plenty of bars where one could choose to enter any level of drunkenness, from slightly buzzed to trashed as a local news anchor on payday (or at lunchtime). The Nyabinghi (1229 Salt Springs Road ) offers many ways to forget your troubles and to create new ones; but more importantly, every Wednesday night at 11 PM the ‘Binghi (which is what the cool kids and also me call it) has a little something called Crapaoke.

When I first started going to Crapaoke, I had absolutely no intention of singing. This did not last long. What started as a plan to drink until the feelings of immortality and Lotharioism kicked in diverted horribly when I found myself staggering towards a stage. A man was calling my name, but why? For extroverts, performing in front of a group of people comes as easily as finding a beautiful mate and being highly successful in life (I hate you). The rest of us are constantly skating on thin ice, with the slightest faux pas threatening to shame us into a more hermitlike state than J.D. Salinger or Bobcat Goldthwait. But, unexpectedly, Crapaoke is extremely liberating, even to curmudgeonly writers and those with similar mental problems.

Allow me to explain.

With Krapaoke, there is a certain sense of “shared shame”- those crafty Germans probably have a word for it. No matter how bad you are, there’s always someone worse. Unless you’re that guy- you know who I’m talking about. Also, no one expects you to be good. The only people who go to karaoke and expect to be wowed are those who mourn the loss of The Family Channel and the quality programming associated with that network. Performance is not the central theme of Krapaoke; the central theme is being something very appropriate to do while drunk. Think of it as your modern day equivalent of bear-baiting, but without wenches selling oranges and only marginal risk of bear rampages. It’s the visceral feeling of experiences like hearing a very fat man sing Madonna that keep people coming back for more.

But even if you still feel shamed, the dim lighting of the Nyabinghi combined with several custom-made dark corners will allow you to lose yourself in the power of anonymity. You could also carve out a new life as a bar-corner troll, but lack of goat traffic could mean death by starvation. Still, there are options.

So, should you decide to make your Wednesday nights more interesting than falling asleep with Easy Mac spilled all over your lap while the TV plays episode after hilarious episode of “The George Lopez Show,” just remember two things. One: don’t sing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” unless you want to be shamed in print; I am not above doing this. Two: you never saw me there, and you never heard my heartbreaking rendition of “Uptown Girl.”