Trying out some karaoke on Friday.

There's this one bar right off the main shopping district downtown -- right in the shadow of Nordstrom's, practically! -- that no one ever goes to because it just looks like a filthy gyros place down a backstreet, but if you look very carefully at the sign, it says "gyros and lounge", and if you go back through the front gyros part (no seating), you emerge into this dingy bar with a hard-bitten waitress named Patrice and a killer dish of chili mac served up fresh.

Anyways, I've gone there a few times, and when I was there this last Friday, it was even more wonderful than usual; the owner was in, this Greek guy, so he was sending around pieces of cheese on toothpicks and devilled eggs for free to everyone drinking beer, which I wasn't aware that he did, though it makes perfect sense since Greeks are like that. I guess he does this every night around a certain time when he comes in, only sometimes it's not just cheese and devilled eggs, but also little cocktail weiners or wingdings.

When me and my friend didn't order a third beer, Patrice asked us why, and we said because we were going to see the Hairspray remake, and she started saying how her daughter had to go to that to see Zac Efron and her husband took her that week, but she's not going to go because she loved the original so much. "You just can't replace Warren Beatty," she was like, which confused everyone. Then, though, after a few seconds and a thinking look on his face, the regular sitting near us was like, "You're thinking of Shampoo," and Patrice thought for a second and was like, "Yeah, you're right. I guess I haven't seen Hairspray."

After that, I talked with the regular some more and he started talking about how the good bars downtown got eaten up by tourist places and yuppies and said bar was "a cozy little nest in the middle of all this bullshit." Not only was he trying to get me to call Patrice "Pat Rice", but he also told me that the bar has karaoke on the last Friday of every month, and he gestured to this fat pale guy with a ponytail on a stool down the bar and was like, "See him?, he's a specialist in Jethro Tull."