Kareoke, Costa Rican Style

Los Mangos #2 is...imagine a very large tin-roofed shed, open on three sides, built on a hill in a field. It has a concrete floor that rises with the slope of the field in stages so that there are different levels; there is a bar in the middle, and tables and chairs everywhere else. Ominously, at least in retrospect, there is a massive widescreen projection TV on the back wall of the highest level. As we sat down to order, there were Spanish words on it, turning from yellow to blue as someone sang them.

It is kareoke night.

Spanish songs...I will rephrase that. Songs in Spanish that I have heard sung in Costa Rica, and there are not many, all seem to be slow, sentimental things about love. Or at least the few words that I can get, or translate when I see them, suggest that this is true. There is a guitar or two in the background, gently strummed. And so it was here.

Kareoke in Atenas does not require that the participant get up on a stage; rather a wireless microphone is brought to one's table, and from the comfort of one's chair, one has at it. In the dimly lit, open shed in a pasture with rain drumming out of the night, you cannot always know in whose hands the microphone has been placed. Perhaps relative anomynity confers courage.

Before I say anything else, I must point out that my own skills at singing are non-existent, and that I could not do even half as well as what followed. But at least I know that I cannot carry a tune in a bucket.

Someone had been indifferently wringing the pleasure out of a song and hanging the remains up to dry when we arrived, but not obtrusively so. That ended and we ordered. After some time the man working the kareoke machine got up and passed the torch to some burly Costa Rican men in trucker's caps seated around at table covered in food and beer bottles quite close to us, and it occured to me that we might accidently offend someone. I opened my mouth to say that whatever happened next, we should not laugh; the words never made it out of my mouth.

Afterwards, Jane said that at least, he did manage to hit some notes.

He didn't just hit them, he smashed them bloody to the floor, kicked them while they were down, then backed up and drove over the corpses two or three times. The rest of the time he let sheer volume and toughened vocal cords exuberently beat the thing into submission. He OWNED that song, and never let it forget it.

It was a ballad.

Picture a bull charging out of the gate into the bull ring and straight for the matador, a juiced-up wrestler grabbing his opponent the instant the bell rings and never letting go, a back-alley settling of a gangland feud... and then give up, because this does not do the carnage justice.

Of course I laughed.

I started laughing the moment he slaughtered the first word with a bellow and only stopped some time after he did, my back to his table, shaking, breathless and paralysed. As he sang, I tried to stop when I could focus on the effort; I probably would have bitten my lip through except that he would find a new way to mangle a note and start me off again. He wasn't just handing in a merely adequate performance, he was pouring his soul into the microphone, like Frank Sinatra trying to impress God, but without the humility.

It was worse than laughing in church or at a funeral, unless they have taken to serving beer at either.

If I had a thought, it was mostly about how hard this was going to be to explain in the three or four words of Spanish that I know, that I wasn't laughing AT him, but WITH him, before he gave up clubbing the notes and started in on the bystanders.

Lord he was bad.

I know that as a guest here it is not my place to do anything but avoid Los Mango Dos on kareoke night for the rest of my life, and believe me, this will not be hard. (The food is so good I would gladly eat here any and every other night) The gentleman has every right to sing in any off-key manner he sees fit, and his willingness to do so in public is probably to be commended rather than censured. I don't think any of the other patrons nearly had embarassing accidents while listening; in fact there were others there equally willing to perform as poorly, if without the verve. Sometime afterward, a woman sang, and Jane informs me that that she was musically more incompetent. Perhaps this is true; I lack the skill to judge. She only marginally reminded us of a cat pulled by its tail though a knothole in the barn wall. But at least she wasn't as loud.