“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.
Kitchen Table Indictments
The next morning, the indignation hadn’t faded. It clung to me like the smell of fryer oil on my jacket. I sat at my kitchen island, nursing a coffee, while my husband, Mark, buttered his toast.
“He called you ‘mom’?” Mark asked, his brow furrowed. “The little punk.”
“And it wasn’t just that,” I explained, pacing the length of the granite countertop. “It was the way he said it. Like I was a fly in his artisanal, curated soup. For two months, it’s been the same thing. We get there early, we sign up, and we watch the same dozen kids sing twice, sometimes three times, before one of us gets called around midnight, right before he shuts it down.”
Mark took a bite of toast. He’s an engineer, a man who sees the world as a series of problems to be solved with logic and data. “So, he’s playing favorites. It’s his show. He can run it however he wants, can’t he?”
“But it’s supposed to be first-come, first-served! That’s the entire premise of karaoke sign-ups. It’s the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter if you’re a CEO or a college kid, you write your name down and you wait your turn. He’s turned it into his personal fiefdom.”
“His ‘Mic List Mafia’,” Mark chuckled, trying to lighten the mood.
I stopped pacing. “Don’t joke. It feels like that. It’s just so… dismissive. We spend money there. We’re good customers. But to him, we’re just these middle-aged women with our sad little power ballads, harshing his cool-kid mellow.”
The ethical gears in my project-manager brain were grinding. This wasn’t just about a missed chance to sing “Alone” by Heart. It was about fairness. It was about the casual ageism that seeps into the world, telling you that your time is past, your tastes are irrelevant. It was a microcosm of a much larger, more insidious cultural shrug.
“What are you going to do?” Mark asked, wiping crumbs from his mouth. “Find a new bar?”
The thought was tempting. Just walk away. Find a place with an older crowd, a KJ who still had a CD binder. But the idea of letting Leo win, of letting his smug, generational gatekeeping go unchallenged, stuck in my craw. It felt like surrender.
“No,” I said, my voice hardening. “I’m not going to find a new bar. I’m going to figure out exactly what his game is.”
A Wrinkle in the System
That next Thursday, I arrived with a new sense of purpose. I wasn’t just here to sing; I was on a reconnaissance mission. I ordered my chardonnay and, when Leo wasn’t looking, I pulled out my phone. I angled it just so and took a clear, time-stamped photo of the sign-up sheet at 8:15 PM. Our names were fourth, fifth, and sixth on the list.
The first three singers, a trio of earnest guys in flannel, went up in order. My heart gave a hopeful flutter. Maybe I’d imagined it all. Maybe last week was a fluke.
Then the V-Neck Crew arrived.
They didn’t even go to the sign-up sheet. Chad, the ringleader, sauntered right up to Leo’s stand. There was a low murmur of conversation, a bro-hug, and then something else. A handshake that was more than a handshake. I saw the corner of a green bill pass from Chad’s palm to Leo’s. It was fast, slick, and practiced. Leo didn’t even look at it, just palmed it and slipped it into his pocket as he cued up the next track.
And who was the next singer? Not me, not Maria, not Chloe. It was Tiffany, who had just walked in the door.
My blood ran cold, then hot. It wasn’t just favoritism. It wasn’t just about “curating a vibe.” It was a grift. A pay-to-play scheme running right here in our friendly neighborhood dive bar.
I watched Leo for the rest of the night, my project manager brain kicking into overdrive. I saw it two more times. A quiet word, a subtle hand-off, and a sudden, magical leap to the top of the queue. The notebook on his stand was pure fiction, a prop to maintain the illusion of fairness. The real list was in his head, dictated by his ego and his wallet.
My friends were getting visibly frustrated, ready to cash out and call it a night.
“Just one more drink,” I urged them, my eyes glued to the stage. “I have a feeling things are about to get interesting.”
They didn’t know it yet, but this was no longer a simple complaint. It was an investigation. And I was about to start gathering my evidence.
The Investigation: The Data Doesn’t Lie
My work bag, usually filled with Gantt charts and budget proposals, now held a different kind of project file: a slim notebook labeled “The Rusty Mic.” For the next three weeks, I became a karaoke ethnographer. My methods were simple but ruthlessly effective.
Each Thursday, I’d arrive at 8:00 PM sharp.
Step one: Time-stamped photo of the official sign-up sheet.
Step two: Open a note on my phone.
Step three: Record the actual order of singers, timestamped, with the name of their song.
The discrepancy was staggering. On paper, the list was a beautiful, democratic mix of ages and genres. In reality, it was a closed loop. The same eight to ten people, all under thirty, all part of Leo’s inner circle, cycled through repeatedly. My friends and I, along with a handful of other patient, older regulars, were the “filler.” He’d sprinkle us in every ninety minutes or so, like a chef adding just enough salt to a dish to claim it’s seasoned.
One night, a man named Doug, a sweet retired postal worker who always sang Johnny Cash, waited for two and a half hours. His name was clearly visible, tenth on the list. Leo called number nine, then number twenty-four, then number fifteen. Doug finally packed up his coat and left, his shoulders slumped. Leo didn’t even notice.
I documented it all. Chad’s three performances in one night. Brittany’s back-to-back songs. The way Leo would announce, “Alright, let’s pull from the bottom of the list to mix it up!” and then mysteriously call a name that wasn’t on the list at all—someone who had just walked in.
Maria thought I was becoming obsessed. “Rhea, it’s karaoke. Are you building a legal case against him?”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” I’d say, my fingers flying across my phone’s keyboard. “It’s a broken system. And I know how to fix broken systems.”
At work, I managed multi-million dollar construction projects. I wrangled contractors, appeased stakeholders, and navigated byzantine permit processes. I lived by timelines, budgets, and clearly defined deliverables. Leo’s little karaoke kingdom was, in its own small way, the most poorly managed project I’d ever seen. And it was starting to piss me off.
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