Living on a Prayer

It must be told that the DJ last night was possibly the worst I've ever heard. His "mixing" from song to song could only have been worse if there was silence. Actually, that may have been an improvement to the desecration of songs by the painful overlapping with different beats and tones, even different lyrics going at once.

He did at one point have a little string of songs that were fun and we really wanted to dance so we tolerated the bad transitions. And we're dancing and rocking out. There's a group of girls next to me with the pile of purses in the middle of their circle, but there aren't enough of them to complete the circle as large as they were trying for it to be AND they weren't sober enough to maintain the circle. (I looked at them and heard Dane Cook saying, "F*** guys tonight! Let's just dance!")

It's good craic at this point. Some of the guys from the postgrad posse showed up and we're having a laugh and then it happened: I heard the intro I know so well. And I see the faces of these guys light up, too. Especially this one guy who's just grand (Padraic, I think). And we're all singing at the top of our lungs while we jump around and dance to Bon Jovi. And when it gets to the big guitar riffs, I'm flanked by three or four drunk Irishmen doing air guitar. (I thought about doing the air tambourine, but I opted to just take in the hilarity of the moment instead.) And the next song was the Clash "Should I Stay or Should I Go" and that was brilliant, too. And then it was some song I didn't know, but they were all still bouncing and rocking out and it was weird to have been so completely in the loop for five or ten minutes and then realize I am in a completely different country with a different history of popular (or guilty-pleasure) music.

Still, it's nice to know that there are folks in Ireland who know the glory and grandeur of rocking out to "Living on a Prayer."