I Just Remembered Why, Part One

I just remembered why I stay home on Saturday nights.

So when last you heard from your intrepid blogger (other than a momentary interlude of NASCAR-related angst), she was leaving for the night to go take the bus to Tim's favorite bar, to catch up with Tim and a potential roomie.

The first inkling that perhaps staying home might have been a good idea: the RFK project.

The RFK project has taken over downtown--mysterious signage everywhere, odd street closures, random helicopters--and it's only if you've read the paper, watched the news or otherwise related to the city of Chicago in the past few weeks that you would know what RFK is.

RFK--abbreviation for "Rory's First Kiss"--is the code name being used for the filming of the latest "Batman" movie. The official title of this film is "The Dark Knight", but to many Chicagoans I suspect it will forever be known as "...Fucking 'Batman'".

I am now one of those Chicagoans. After a long wait while something was filmed in the path of my bus, I finally gave up and started walking. The walk eventually led me to the Red Line subway station at Jackson, which experience I shall shortly contribute to http://www.ctatattler.com/ as "When Busking Goes Wrong".

I first heard the singer as I descended the stairs. He had a very good voice--something along the lines of R.Kelly--and he was singing freestyle lyrics over R&B instrumentals. And that's where things started going bad...The lyrics were, to put it bluntly, cliched R&B dreck of the worst sort. Now you all know me by now; I loooooove me some hip-hop and some R&B--but oh, man. Many many repetitions of "she's my queeeeeen" and "she gets me...Poppin...." (lifted directly from the Chris Brown song of the same name), and lots of references to "we gotta stop hatin'" and name-drops of everyone from Michael Jackson to WGCI-FM to (of course) Jesus. All strung together with no regard for lyrical coherence or fluidity...though again, to give credit where it's due, the singer had an EXCELLENT voice. It's just his lyricist that needed killing.

And then things went from bad to....Well, to SOMETHING, anyhow.

In the midst of this string of lyrical free-association, somewhere into the song insinuated the idea of "callin' my baby". And he inserted the requisite "ring....ring...." sound effects, to convey the idea all the more thoroughly...

And the instrumental stopped.

What follows is my best recollection of what came next.

"Rrrriiiinng.......rrrrriiing.....(click noise, falsetto voice) Hello?" (pause)"Hello?"
(raspy evil voice) "I know what you did last summer!"
(pause, then falsetto) "Um.....uh.....You do?"
(raspy evil voice) "Yes...yes i do. And you wanna know what?"
(falsetto) "What?"
(r.e.v) "I've got a girl in my car, and her mouth is taped shut with duct tape, and I've got her tied up and I'm gonna drive my car into the river!"

There was more, but I was laughing too hard by this point to adequately follow. The raspy-versus-falsetto conversation went on for ten or twelve more sentences, and finally the raspy evil voice finished off with "And you know what else? I'm gonna finish singing my song now."

The instrumental resumed, and back we went to "she's my queen....she gets me poppin..."

Later--it took twenty-five eternal minutes before the train arrived--there was another "phone interlude", this one conducted with the background music still playing, in which Disinterested Manly Thug Voice informed Falsetto Hopeful "Female" Voice that no, she could NOT come to his house, because she had "bumps all around her mouth". "Don't be talkin' about me," Hopeful "Female" Voice warned Disinterested Manly Thug Voice, to which DMTV replied "You talked about me first. I gotta go." (click)

Fortunately, it was around this time that the train appeared in the distance.

Part Two, and possibly Three, to follow. It was a seriously long, weird night.