“Gotta curate the vibe, mom,” the karaoke host smirked, his words cutting through the noise of a bad Olivia Rodrigo cover.
He didn’t just skip our songs; our turn was a casualty in his personal war against anyone over thirty. For weeks, my friends and I had watched his little grift unfold, a pay-to-play scheme disguised as a karaoke night. The man-bunned tyrant in charge of the microphone had made our one night out his personal fiefdom.
But calling me mom was his final, fatal mistake.
He was about to learn that a project manager with a grudge keeps very detailed receipts, and I was preparing to present my findings in the most public and humiliating way imaginable.
The Slow Burn: The Gospel of Leo
The air in The Rusty Mic tasted like stale beer, lemon-scented cleaning fluid, and shattered dreams. It was our sanctuary. Every Thursday for the past two years, my friends Maria, Chloe, and I would claim our corner booth, the one with the cracked red vinyl that stubbornly imprinted its pattern onto your thighs. It was our weekly ritual, a pressure-release valve from project deadlines, teenage sons, and the quiet hum of suburban existence. For three hours, we weren’t a project manager, a dental hygienist, and a high school librarian. We were rock stars in waiting.
Our god was the Karaoke Host, a man-bunned tyrant in his late twenties named Leo. He commanded the room from a throne of tangled cables and a glowing laptop screen, holding the power of song in his hands. Tonight, like the past six Thursdays, that power felt… selective.
We’d put our names in at 8:02 PM. It was now 9:47 PM. I’d nursed one overpriced chardonnay to its watery dregs. Maria had already cycled through two spicy margaritas and was tapping a restless rhythm on the sticky table.
“Seriously?” she muttered, watching a girl in a crop top—we’ll call her Tiffany—bounce off the stage after a breathless rendition of a Taylor Swift song. It was her second time up. We hadn’t even been called once.
“The list is the list, Maria,” Chloe said, ever the diplomat, pushing her glasses up her nose. “He’s probably just trying to mix up the genres.”
But he wasn’t. The genre for the last hour had been “V-Neck and Vocal Fry.” A parade of Chads and Tiffanies, all seemingly friends of Leo’s, had been on a non-stop rotation. They sang current pop hits, hip-hop tracks with more spoken words than notes, and the occasional ironic 90s boy band tune. Our slips of paper, bearing the weight of Pat Benatar, Bonnie Raitt, and a very ambitious Heart ballad, languished in his little plastic box.
Leo scanned his laptop, a smirk playing on his lips. “Alright, alright, settle down, you animals. We got another banger coming up. Give it up for… Chad!”
The same Chad who had murdered a Post Malone song forty minutes ago swaggered back to the stage. My jaw tightened. It wasn’t just about the wait. It was the slow, creeping realization that the rules, the ones we’d all implicitly agreed to by writing our names on a slip of paper, didn’t apply to everyone. There was a system here, and at forty-nine years old, I was apparently on the wrong side of it.
Curating the Vibe
“Okay, my name is literally next,” Maria hissed an hour later, pointing at the dog-eared spiral notebook Leo now used as a queue list, propped open on the edge of his DJ stand. From our vantage point, we could just make out her name scrawled under a guy named “Kevin G.”
Kevin G. finished a surprisingly soulful rendition of a Sam Cooke classic. The room applauded, a genuine, warm sound. It was a brief respite from the parade of trendy apathy.
Leo grabbed the mic. “Big ups for Kevin G., folks. A true classic. Now, let’s keep that energy high.” He glanced down at his notebook, his eyes skipping right over Maria’s name. I saw it happen. It wasn’t a mistake. It was a decision. “Let’s get… Brittany back up here!”
A collective groan escaped our booth. Brittany, of the glitter eyeshadow and questionable vocal control, had already sung once.
Maria slumped back into the vinyl, defeated. “I don’t get it. He looked right at my name.”
“Maybe he thinks ‘Conga’ is a low-energy song?” Chloe offered weakly.
That’s when it happened. As Brittany shrieked her way through an Olivia Rodrigo bridge, I caught Leo’s eye. I gave him a small, questioning shrug, a universally understood gesture for “What gives?”
He leaned over his laptop and smirked, a conspiratorial, condescending little grin. He cupped his hand over his mouth and stage-whispered, loud enough for me to hear over the music, “Gotta curate the vibe, mom. Ballads and oldies kill the flow.”
Mom.
The word landed like a punch to the gut. It wasn’t just that he called me old. It was the casual dismissal, the smug certainty that my taste, my generation, my very presence was a problem to be managed. A vibe-killer. He hadn’t just skipped my friends; he had passed a judgment. We were the background noise, the nostalgic filler he had to tolerate between the real performers, the ones who mattered.
I looked at Maria’s disappointed face, at Chloe’s attempt to find a logical reason for blatant disrespect. The stale air in the bar suddenly felt suffocating. The issue wasn’t the list anymore. The issue was Leo.
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