bridgeburner
threadkiller
- Joined
- Dec 5, 2001
- Posts
- 2,712
Okay, it wasn't official or anything, but it could have been!
So I'm making the dreaded late-Sunday-Afternoon grocery run because I always seem to forget until the last minute that I have to prepare meals for the rest of the week.
The place is packed and there's a higher percentage of elderly folks than when I usually shop. I grab the stuff I need and then get in the long line to wait. Then I hear.....well, I suppose you could call it singing. At first I think it's either a mentally challenged person or a drunk, but it goes on and on and there's some uneasy laughter and some kind of announcement over the loudspeaker that's totally unintelligible except for a tone of "Hey! Lookee here!"
And then my line moves forward enough for me to see what all the racket is about.
Just across the exit corridor at the end of my checkout line there is a lovely, young, gay boy in a cage singing show tunes and pop hits at the top of his lungs. Outside the bars is a bucket with a sign for donations to some charity or other with the implication being when a certain dollar amount is reached the Incredible Off-Key Gay Boy will stop singing.
He's wailing Celine Dion and Taylor Swift at the top of his lungs and you can tell he's torn between being very self-conscious and loving being such a spectacle. He'll belt out a few lines and then shyly drop his head and look up from under his lashes at people like a puppy and then burst into song again.
And nobody quite knows what to make of it. Most people are so uncomfortable that they can't look directly at him and they're giving the nervous chuckle and trying to grin it away with furtive looks at one another and they walk right past him =-----because it's the only way out of the store---- trying to pretend that they don't see him and that nothing is wrong.
Just think, it's a grocery store fer cryin' out loud and this one kid in a cage wearing a perfectly respectable shirt and tie is unsettling an entire crowd of people while simultaneously swinging the pendulum between humiliation and euphoria.
And all I could think was that Netzach would've loved it.
So I'm making the dreaded late-Sunday-Afternoon grocery run because I always seem to forget until the last minute that I have to prepare meals for the rest of the week.
The place is packed and there's a higher percentage of elderly folks than when I usually shop. I grab the stuff I need and then get in the long line to wait. Then I hear.....well, I suppose you could call it singing. At first I think it's either a mentally challenged person or a drunk, but it goes on and on and there's some uneasy laughter and some kind of announcement over the loudspeaker that's totally unintelligible except for a tone of "Hey! Lookee here!"
And then my line moves forward enough for me to see what all the racket is about.
Just across the exit corridor at the end of my checkout line there is a lovely, young, gay boy in a cage singing show tunes and pop hits at the top of his lungs. Outside the bars is a bucket with a sign for donations to some charity or other with the implication being when a certain dollar amount is reached the Incredible Off-Key Gay Boy will stop singing.
He's wailing Celine Dion and Taylor Swift at the top of his lungs and you can tell he's torn between being very self-conscious and loving being such a spectacle. He'll belt out a few lines and then shyly drop his head and look up from under his lashes at people like a puppy and then burst into song again.
And nobody quite knows what to make of it. Most people are so uncomfortable that they can't look directly at him and they're giving the nervous chuckle and trying to grin it away with furtive looks at one another and they walk right past him =-----because it's the only way out of the store---- trying to pretend that they don't see him and that nothing is wrong.
Just think, it's a grocery store fer cryin' out loud and this one kid in a cage wearing a perfectly respectable shirt and tie is unsettling an entire crowd of people while simultaneously swinging the pendulum between humiliation and euphoria.
And all I could think was that Netzach would've loved it.
