To celebrate our upgrade to Windows 3.1 in the early nineties, my dad bought this karaoke program for the PC.  It included a microphone and came loaded with a few random songs, like Yankee Doodle and Dust in the Wind, and then he bought two “expansion” packs - Frank Sinatra, and Michael Jackson. (Do we see a pattern here? That my parents endured constant singing for nearly two decades? Man, I was annoying.)

The Michael Jackson karaoke cd had a couple songs I didn’t recognize, deeper cuts off the Thriller album. You know people have been coming out with these poetic stories about how they first heard Thriller, how they bought it the day it came out, how it blew their minds? I bought Thriller because I wanted to know how the songs went, so I could sing them on karaoke. This doesn’t exactly score me any cool points. To be fair, that album came out before I was born, and I should give myself credit for paying heed to a musical masterpiece while my classmates were touting the greatness of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch.

Then, of course, Dangerous came out, which many people forget about, but WHICH WAS AWESOME. Pretty sure me and Emily Friar warped both copies of our cassettes on that one.  How many times did we play this song from Free Willy, Em? My estimate: Eleventy Billion.

Every Day of 1992:

Dad: Will you please pick another song to sing?

Me: What?

Dad: I’ve had enough of that song for today.

Me: What song?

Dad: The one about the River Jordan!!!

To Part IV