Saturday May 20, 2006 – Musical Train Wreck

The highlight of this past weekend was a live viewing of the annual Eurovision song contest at a pub. We had heard about the contest for the past month and have been building up enthusiasm and excitement for watching it. Eurovision is kind of like American Idol on a huge scale. Months ago, most countries in Europe (very broad encompassing Europe as it includes countries like Russia, Israel…) had a competition in their country to determine who their best performer/singer was. The popular vote of the residents of that country determines who is nominated to be in Eurovision. In decades past, stars like ABBA and Celine Dion performed and won the competition, but the contest over the past decade or so has kind of been considered pretty lame by most of Europe. Wikipedia probably states it best with “some viewers of the Contest view the event as a combination of camp entertainment and a musical train wreck.” There did seem to be quite a lot of hokey pop songs about love, peace, etc. but it is so wonderfully corny and fun that you have to watch. The rumor is that last year Ireland lost on purpose (won the previous three years in a row) because they didn't want to be stuck hosting the broadcast again, which is inevitably a money losing proposition.

Finland's(and overall winner for that matter) and Germany's entries:

Our little five some (me, "C", the German, the Brit, and the Canadian) got a prime outside table in front of a large projection screen. The German had picked up little Country flags which adorned our table. On Friday night, the Brit (he and the German grew up watching the show) came up with an elaborate scheme to complement the Eurovision contest with a drinking game; which is apparently par for the course for most people watching. Each of us drew five countries at random and based on the performance of those countries is how the penalty drinks were allocated. Pretty much each time your country’s singer: winked at the camera, dropped to their knees, made a peace sign, wore a hat, has a mustache, sang in their native language, played and ethnic instrument, played a piano while standing, pretended to fight, performed ethnic dancing, told audience they love them, lost a microphone, used props or fireworks, had a mullet... you had to drink two fingers (depth) of beer from a pint glass. During each countries performance, all our eyes were intently on the screen hoping for a knee drop, a mullet, ethnic dancing so beer drinking infractions could be tallied. We were laughing, shouting the aforementioned infractions, rating each performance, and drinking the whole time.

The Brit also had an elaborate equation for the penalty shots in the scoring round of the show. Each country’s population can call in after viewing all the performances (two hours no commercials) and vote who they liked best (can’t vote for their own country). There is pretty much 45 minutes of going live to each country to hear how they allocated their votes. In order not to consume penalty shots you really didn’t want any of your countries to do well – the higher the points, the more shots you had to take. The poor German had to down 15 Baileys shots because her countries did so well. In lieu of booze, I was drinking Red Bull energy drinks like they were going out of style - 7 in a 3 hour block. Like Jekyll and Hyde, I turned into a jittery crazed lunatic…actually not, but it took me until 5AM to finally fall asleep. I will never have any desire to ever consume another one of those Mountain Dewey mediciney concoctions. All in all it was a great fun evening, but Sunday was a lazy recovery day. Get ready for a P&C Eurovision drinking contest party next year, because we are definitely bringing this tradition back to the States!

In case you've got time to kill, here's a few other countries entries:
Norway - "C's" favorite
England - my favorite
Russia (note the mullet, prop (person coming out of piano), and the much anticipated dropping to knees at the end)
Lithuania
Croatia (note the ethnic dancing, ethnic instrument, native language, hats...many "infractions")