Friday Night Live

So in my last post I promised more about my neighbors. The best way to begin perhaps is to describe a typical Friday night. I'll introduce the neighbors slowly over a few posts.

So on Fridays, after dinner, we often gather at The Chef's house. He lives 2 doors down from Brian and I. He's got a pool - which makes his house the gathering place during the summer as well. Every weekend, all summer long, we sit on the back porch, sometimes swimming, sometimes chatting, usually with a beer. He's called The Chef because he's always grilling something up.

Alas, he is selling his house soon and moving to nearby digs. What the rest of the block is going to do this summer is anybody's guess. If you come down our street in July, you might find us wandering aimlessly like zombies, drink in hand, sunglasses on, holding a towel.

But during the colder months we usually sit around his kitchen table, swapping stories from the week, having some beer, etc.

Around 10 or so, Brian brings out his guitar. Brian is a pretty good guitar player and has a wide range of songs under his belt. By 10 pm, we all believe that we are pretty good singers with a wide range of lyrics under out belt; but we're not and we don't.

We start out by requesting a song and Brian starts to play it.

We sing the first verse minus a couple of words and we're not bad with the chorus and then we break down:

"Hmm, lala, oh yeah, don't we sing..."

"No, we already sang that"

"Who knows the words?"

"I thought you did"

That song fades and we beg for another song. All those songs we can sing word for word in the car are completely out of our brain by 10:15 on a Friday night.

And yet, it doesn't stop us from trying.

I always request that Brian sing Blackbird by The Beatles. On our honeymoon in Paris we sat at a cafe and watched a guy play guitar on the corner. After a few songs, Brian got up to chat with him and the guy offered to let him play. And Brian played Blackbird so it's a sweet memory song for me. But I don't know all the words to it.

One night, The Chef's girlfriend, Twiggy (you can probably guess why she's named that), took a phone movie of all us singing. I thought she should put it on YouTube. We'd be an instant hit! We could do a little webseries, filming our Friday night band. People would flock to their computers to watch us make absolute fools of ourselves.

C'mon, admit it, you'd watch.