Office Space Influence

This still cracks me up and I have to share...

The big news in Trinidad last week was not my arrival on the island, but that Michael Bolton was performing a sold out show there. Yes, he with his once-flowing locks/mullet is still popular, it seems.

So Mutsumi and I are out for our anniversary last Friday and get pretty hammered down in St. James, which is something like I guess what Bourbon St. in New Orleans is. It's where everyone goes to party. People are drinking and dancing in the streets. (I'll have the full report on that night and pics soon.) But anyway, we stay until 1ish, then head back to the hotel. Feeling up for one more drink, we hit the hotel's Carnival Bar (Contrary to popular belief, Carnival started in Trinidad, not Brazil.), only to learn we had just missed Michael Bolton, who was staying at the Hilton. Not that I have any great desire to meet the guy, but it would've been pretty funny to have a picture of him and me in Trinidad, I thought.

I'll digress a bit here, but you see, Michael B. used to own a restaurant in Fairfield, CT where I grew up. This was at the height of his popularlity and it was a pretty big deal. I can't remember the name of the place now, but a bucnh of my friends worked there and everyone said that Michael was a prick so I never really cared for the man or his music.

Anyway, it seems he's still a prick as the bartender and waiters at the Carival Bar seemed to be pretty down the guy and were bitching about him. They were joking and laughing that it would be funny to pull a prank on him and let his room number slip. Turns out it was the room right above mine. So in my drunken stupor, I told them I had an idea.

Originally I was going to post the hotel phone number and Bolton's room number on Millar's boards and ask people to crank call him, but I was sober enough to realize this was a bad idea as strangers could then call me too. So what I did was send out an e-mail with that info to a bunch of friends asking them to do it. I went to bed thinking this was going to be hilarious.

Then I woke up the next morning with one of those "Oh, why the hell did I do that?!" thoughts in my head. I felt stupid and figured everyone would just ignore my sloshed call to arms to screw with Michael. But they didn't.

It turns out a number of people did call him. And they left messages. Funny messages. I started reading what they had done and cracked up. My favorite message, left by a friend and colorist who shall remain nameless, was the entire Pat O'Brien sex tape. I now have this vision in my head of Michael Bolton, who still has long hair in my mind as it's funnier that way, sitting there in his room with the phone reciever held to his ear, listening to this man's voice telling him, "You're so hot... I want you so bad...", with this confused look on his face. It cracks me up every time.

Ah, the stupid things we do to make ourselves laugh.