Mixing Saint Patrick's Day and karaoke night makes everyone green with envy at the neighborhood bar.

It had been years since last I visited Blue's House of Wings in Mount Pleasant, S.C. Two of my friends from high school have been Blue's regulars since they moved to Charleston's favorite bedroom community during the early '90s.

Several of us from that wide circle of friends living elsewhere had come to the Lowcountry for a weekend of golf and fishing when half of us landed at Blue's on the greenest night of the year.

I admit to leading a more sheltered life since my three daughters came into it, but I swear I thought karaoke machines had by now gone the way of CB radios.

Wrong.

Karaoke machines are stereos that exclude the lead vocal tracks on popular music recordings so that anyone, regardless of talent, can take the microphone. The results are mixed at best.

Two couples rose to slow dance while a full-figured Patsy Cline impersonator offered up a heartfelt rendition of "Crazy."

Heartfelt but far from "Crazy," the song's mournful melody was way out of sync with the flashing strings of battery-powered lights that adorned the singer's green hat and T-shirt.

"If you tried to write this scene into a movie," I said to my friend Gordon, "it wouldn't make it past the first edit."

"Why not?" he asked.

"Too unbelievable," I said.

Gordon, one of the Blue's regulars, was amused by my disbelief. He's witnessed enough karaoke nights at Blue's to be an expert on diagnosing tone-deafness.

"Believe it," he said while leading several others at our unofficial judges' table in a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the would-be Patsy.

The gesture involved holding up a burning cigarette lighter in a manner normally reserved for coaxing rock bands back to the stage for encores. No repeat performances were actually being requested this night, however.

It shouldn't surprise me that the karaoke culture is so strong given that "American Idol" is the No. 1 show on television. Call it karaoke on steroids.

The Blue's lineup included the usual Frank Sinatra, Michael Jackson, Barry Manilow and Otis Redding impersonators. There was even one impersonator who was impersonating Michael Bolton impersonating Otis Redding.

It had been so long since I was out on karaoke night, I'd never witnessed rap songs performed from behind the sound machine.

I don't like rap music. My negative feelings for the genre are so strong, in fact, that using the words "rap" and "music" in the same sentence seems like a severe injustice upon the latter.

Surprisingly, I could tolerate the rap impersonations more easily than the standard stuff. It's because my ear knows how the standards are supposed to sound. The rap singers could be three octaves off on a Fifty Cent rendition of a Snoop Dogg tune, and I would never know the difference.

"Of all the technology given to us by the Japanese," Gordon opined between songs, "karaoke is the cruelest."

So why does he torture himself on so many Saturday nights?

"I just can't sit at home," Gordon said. "I'm afraid I'll miss something."

He has a point. As long as there's karaoke at Blue's, who needs "American Idol?"