Singing for our supper

A funny thing often happens when I get in a taxi over here. The drivers don't usually know much English, but they always seem to have a pre-set button on their radios set to an English-language station. (I'm not sure if there's more than one of those or not, since I stick to CDs in my own apartment.) And when a white guy gets in the cab, they always put that station on. I appreciate the gesture, but that station tends to play very old, square-the-minute-they-were-released easy listening songs that so many people love to hate. They are, however, pretty easy to sing, which leads to a certain impromptu karaoke effect. I've actually gotten pretty good at Engelbert Humperdinck's "A Man Without Love," which is really very cathartic to sing. (Think of all the big climaxes in the refrain - "Every day I wake up, then I start to break up," etc.)

I'd had that thought several times before last Saturday night, when Trina and I hailed a cab home from Chung Li. It was about a twenty minute ride. And the driver had a karaoke machine on his passenger seat.

He handed us back the microphones without really explaining what they were for - he probably didn't have enough English to do so, although he was able to speak a little. It was left to us to figure it out, which of course was pretty easy to do when he hit the play button on the video monitor on the dashboard. There was the classic serene clip of an anonymous but attractive woman wandering around the grounds of some vacation spot to the tune of Jacko's "You Are Not Alone," with the lyrics rolling by below.

Well, we did need to keep him happy if we wanted to get home.

The ride lasted about five songs, each one worse than the last and all of them making me wish he'd just switch to that cheesy easy listening station - heck, I'd gladly have sung along with those songs at that point. But, like so many such things, it was kind of fun. And the driver seemed to get a kick out of it too. Hey, why not humor the guy, right?

I did have it in the back of my mind that he might take an NT or two off the fare if we sang for him. He didn't, but at least we got a funny memory out of the whole thing. And with the driver's apparent taste in music, he probably didn't know that we couldn't sing anyhow.