Oh Ehm Glee!!

I am a manly man. I fart and burp unapologetically, I am never wrong, I watch sports, and I grow a prodigious amount of facial hair. So I am man enough to admit that I do some not so manly things to balance myself out. For instance, I sometimes ask for directions and bake cookies. And yes, I also… watch Glee.

Maybe some of you don’t know what Glee is (and by that I mean you are telling yourself you don’t know, even though you do know). Glee is a show about a high school singing group that sings a lot. And I mean a lot. They sing about pretty much everything and they don’t care where they are when they do break into song. Which brings up a question: do people who can sing well always just randomly sing about things with other people? I mean, I randomly sing all over the place, and when I sing I sound like a deranged sheep with strep throat. So I can only imagine that people who actually sound good probably sing about groceries.

Anyway, this show has developed its own little cult following of rabid fans who call themselves Gleeks. Now, I do not fall into that category. In fact, I’ve only been watching for about the second half of the first season, and I will admit that some of the character and plot lines irritate the hell out of me. For instance, I’m pretty sure that at one point the plot revolved around a guy who has never had sex in his life thinking that he impregnated his girlfriend. I’m going to assume that he was one of those guys who got pulled out of sex-ed in fifth grade by his parents. You remember those guys? There were always a few who had to leave the class and play Connect-Four or something in a different room while the rest of us learned all the many, wonderful ways that we could contract STDs and die a horrible and painful death.

No, I watch Glee because of the singing. Most of the characters are played by Broadway or pop singers, so the singing on the show is actually very good. Sometimes they sing the songs better than the original artists. Since they can all actually sing, they don’t need a whole lot of instruments and they don’t auto-tune it so much that it sounds like they are singing into fans. Plus, Jane Lynch plays a hilarious cheerleading coach who has some of the best insults on television.

I think that I can explain my affinity for this show. I love music, and the one thing that I wish I was good at was music. As I’ve said before, I suck at singing and I don’t really know how to play any instruments. I feel like if I were good at music, I could spend all of my free time doing that, instead of wasting it writing stupid blogs to irritate people. The one thing that I always promised myself is that I would learn to play the guitar before I die.

I blame my lack of musical talent on my parents. For one thing, neither of them are very musically talented, so I don’t have much to work with genes-wise. Plus, when I was growing up, they killed my showbiz career by enrolling me in the stupidest things. For instance, they signed me up for piano when I was young, instead of a cool instrument. It’s not that pianos are lame, but you can’t really carry them around. Guitar players can carry them around to impress drunken women at parties. I have to somehow hope that for some reason the party has a piano, and even if they do have one, piano music just puts drunken women to sleep. Plus I had some draconian piano teachers. It didn’t help that I never practiced or that I had fingers so clumsy to this day I can’t work touch screens. So needless to say I quit piano by high school.

My musical acting career took a very similar arc. When I was little, my mother signed me up for the play The Wizard of Oz, and I made it through auditions. Of course, I was one of like fifty munchkins, so by “made it through auditions” I mean “I wrote my name down on the signup sheet.” I had about five minutes of stage time, during which I spun around in a circle with other wannabe Broadway stars while lip-synching that stupid yellow brick road song. God that song was irritating. After rehearsing every week, that song for me was like “It’s A Small World” on steroids. So that experience of course deterred me from ever acting again. By the way, I found out this weekend that apparently my friends Baddie and Midget were also munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. They probably don’t want that sort of information going public, but I always change their names so it’s not like anybody knows who I’m talking about.

Speaking of The Wizard of Oz, here is one of my favorite Glee songs from last night’s season finale, a remake of Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” which was a remake of Judy Garland’s original in the movie, to which Pink Floyd apparently wrote The Dark Side of the Moon while on copious amounts of illegal substances. I won’t spoil the finale for you though, so you can go watch the reruns this summer. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to make up for this note in manliness by smashing things with a baseball bat.