You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille
I am the first to admit that I lead a pretty dull life. “I lead a pretty dull life.” See? I’m not known for doing anything real crazy. My idea of a fun weekend consists of watching anime while drinking or programming, always after a fit of home improvement. Yes, I am the definition of lame.
But this past weekend Lori and I decided to “buck the trend” and try something new. Neither of us have ever been to a club or anything other than a college-town bar, so we walked the fine line of our comfort zone and checked out a local place called “Deja Vu” in Bentonville, AR.
On the weekends, Deja Vu is a dueling piano bar. I was a little skeptical about it at first, but for only a $5 cover charge, I was willing to give it a try. The first thing I noticed about the place was that it was packed! It took us a bit to find a seat, but finally sat at a table with some other people.
If you’ve never been to a dueling piano bar let me describe Deja Vu to you: imagine a small-ish rectangular room with the actual “bar” where the drinks are served at the entrance of the place. In the middle is a stage with two grand pianos set up so the performers face each other. In between the pianos is a drum kit (which hardly gets used).
Two performers play the piano simultaneously and sing along, taking requests from the audience. The songs they play range from old standards to new pop music, lewd novelty songs to country and western. There were three performers in all, and they alternated between the pianos, giving each other the occasional break. To get people clapping, they would slam the music-stand lip thing (a technical term) against the the piano pretty hard to create a clapping sound effect. One of the guys would even whip out a harmonica when appropriate.
The best part of it is when they got someone having a birthday, or someone who was a “Deja Vu Virgin” (ie. never having been there before) and made them get up on stage. They would humiliate the person with lewd songs and end it with the title line from Kenny Roger’s You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me Lucille, at which time the audience would point to the person and yell, “You bitch! You slut! You whore!” (The target’s gender doesn’t matter here, btw. Guys are just as likely to get the same treatment. See this everything2 article for more info).
I have to admit the first time I heard this I thought I had walked into a viewing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show gone awry. But man was it a lot of fun! I’ll definitely be going back.