Finding Community Through Karaoke
Acadia Adventures
BAR HARBOR—The bartender crooned out something inoffensive, that total 2000s or 2010s sort of band where tweens go to the concerts, but don’t lose it the way they do for Taylor Swift or BTS.
He started the night of karaoke off and headed back to the bar. Then the crooner who wore the fancy, old-fashioned clothes, one step away from a Sinatra movie, left his tie-dye shirted girlfriend to sit on a chair and not his lap, to belt out a ballad in mellifluous tones. A woman with dulcet tones and a lower register to die for sang hallelujah and pop though she secretly preferred show tunes. The real estate agent sang 1980s songs and before “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” announced, “This one is for you, Bar Harbor. Everybody wants to rule Bar Harbor.”
There were at least five political candidates standing around the bar at Finback Ale House that night. Not all of them heard the improvised intro, but at least one laughed and said, “Wait. What did he say?”
“This one is for you, Bar Harbor,” the woman on the stool near him explained.
“Oh my God, that’s what I thought.”
The songs they sung were all over the place when it came to genre. And the skill they used to sing them? That was all over the place, too. Some sang sober. Some sang solo. Some sang in groups that swayed as they clung to each other for support. Cheers happened. Applause occurred. Democrats, Republicans, Independents, anarchists, people for dog parks and people against, people for cruise ship limits and people against, stood, sat, and sang, applauding each other for being brave, for singing, for grasping and grabbing at notes and melody, and sometimes being spot on. And sometimes being so far from spot on that the song was almost unrecognizable.
“What even is this song?” someone murmured into an ear.
“Doesn’t matter.”
What mattered was the song. What mattered was the urge to sing. What mattered was the urge to cheer in a town that is often believed to be so divided into “us and them” that it’s hard to see the “we” in anything, a town that many believed has lost its soul.
Here’s the thing, one drunk patron told me, we make our own damn narrative as people and as a town. So, too, is the history of karaoke, an entertainment where the narrative isn’t always agreed upon or a straight line. According to Siga, “The origin story of this entertainment form has many twists and turns.”
And sometimes the notes sung reflect that. And sometimes the interactions of the people with glasses held high or flat on tables or spilling onto shirtfronts, people with arms around each other or in pockets or gesticulating madly, will do that, too.
The story of a town even in the throes of elections and controversies about cruise ship visitation numbers, solar arrays, comprehensive plans, and affordable housing is also the story of the twists and turns of each of the individual people that make it a community, be they political figures, social media pundits, or the quiet people huddled in a table of the corner, slowly sipping a dark and stormy.
Sometimes that’s hard to remember, but at karaoke? As patron after patron becomes a performer for three or four minutes? That’s hard to forget.
“I love him,” one council candidate said about another candidate as they sang.
“I love her,” one drunk woman at the bar said as she told a story about a controversial town figure.
“I love you,” someone else mouthed. “I love him.”
To sing something in a bar, in a stadium, in a council chamber, on a street, is to expose yourself for ridicule and opinion, but also to take a chance to bare your soul, to touch someone. It’s goofy and wild and fun and though often surrounded by spirits of the human and inebriating kind, it’s often sobering. And Bar Harbor’s restaurants, pubs, and bars offer the chance to croon to the people you have difference of opinions with instead of, at least for a second, villifying them.
KARAOKE PLACES AND TIMES
This list is not all-inclusive and if you know of somewhere else, let us know and we’ll add it in!
Pizzeria 131—Cottage Street, Bar Harbor, no scheduled karaoke, but occasionally one of the live musicians offers it.
Finback Alehouse—Tuesdays, 9 PM, Cottage Street, Bar Harbor
Pat’s Pizza – Mondays and Fridays, 7 PM, Pleasant Street, Bar Harbor
Lompoc’s—Sundays, check back for times, Rodick Street, Bar Harbor
The Nor’Easter—Thursdays, 7 PM, karaoke and open mic nights, 10 Hunington Road, Northeast Harbor.