Thursday, August 6, 2009

Routine? Not today, baby.


Although there are few things as reassuring as routine, occasionally breaking out of that routine can be enlightening. Or weirdly entertaining, or even liberating. So this afternoon I found myself on an elliptical machine at the gym a full three hours later than usual which meant that I was exposed to a whole new world of bad TV; as opposed to the bad TV to which I’ve already grown accustomed.

Anyway, it seems that a part of that world is someone named Bonnie Hunt who has a talk show (who knew?) which, this very afternoon, featured an overly-enthusiastic audience engaged in a karaoke competition. Normally my default reaction would have been something predictably smug like muttering “really?” while rolling my eyes, but in this case I was transfixed by a young couple that got up and sang Don’t Go Breaking My Heart. They shook. They shimmied. They gave themselves to this performance as though it was a life-defining moment, which it may well have been. Ultimately though, not only was the performance cringe-worthy in both a meta and specific-to-them kind of way, but my heart also went out to this young woman who... wait for it... has no idea that she’s married to a gay guy.

Or maybe she does. Or maybe he isn’t actually gay, but just super-thrilled in an especially fabulous way to be in front of an audience singing an Elton John song. Who knows? More to the point, I guess, is that this couple clearly broke out of their routine for an afternoon and had a great time. So go on, turn off the machine and go do something different for a change. Just like I’m doing right...



P.S. - Oh yeah, and as always, Calvin has something trenchant to add:

1 comment:

Dad Blog said...

A routine is good for kids but as a dad, you need to get out of it and mix things up.