Last Saturday, I asked a friend if she would go to a neighborhood street festival with me. It would be full of fun music, overpriced beer in plastic cups, great tasting food from the not so heart healthy menu, and lots of kiosks of hand-crafted jewelry, which we would invariably ooh and aah over then figure out if we could make something similar ourselves. One of the headlining bands, I explained, did rocking covers of 80’s music like Talking Heads and Huey Lewis.

“Count me in,” she said. “Afterwards, can we go to the lesbian karaoke Irish bar? It’s close to my place.”

I pondered this for a second. I am not a lesbian, and I am actually not a big karaoke fan, but as she described the experience, I couldn’t say no.

“It’s really great,” she went on. “A lot of lesbians come to the place, but gay guys and straights come too. It’s also popular with Native Americans. Everyone really feels free to be themselves and everybody really gets along well with each other.”

After several hours bouncing between the three stages on Roscoe, four beers, one Italian beef sandwich apiece and lots of banter about the abundance of high-end strollers, equipped with multiple hide-away cup holders, we headed to the Lincoln Square area.

When we walked into the bar, the owner, a middle-aged woman with jet black hair and the most striking yellow-green eyes I have ever seen, greeted us. It was around 10:30 and still easy to find an open stool. A half hour later, that would no longer be the case.

My friend lugged the bar’s bible, the binder with laminated sheets listing all the song titles, to our stools. There must have been hundreds, maybe thousands of titles. I joked about performing, and mispronouncing, the Elton John classic, “Hold Me Closer, Tony Danza,” but I was quickly chickening out of making my karaoke debut. No shortage of other talent, though.

There was a bride to be, coyly accessorized in a plastic veil, and her entire posse sitting close to the mic along with a variety of regulars who attended a local music school. Ringers, most of them. I noticed the bar started filling up. There were ladies on dates with their best lady friend, logo-tee wearing straight guys shooting darts and slamming down shots of tequila, gays, fresh from Halsted Street Market Days (another street fair that took place that day in Boys Town)…and the parade of karaoke stars began.

A bridesmaid (apparently no newcomer to a microphone) started things off with a killer version of Killing Me Softly. Then the bride belted out George Michael’s Somebody to Love. Everyone joined in on the chorus as she twirled her veil with her fingers. A tall twenty-something, baring more than a few piercings, belted out Dolly Parton’s Jolene. Everybody was very tolerant when a young guy felt compelled to go counter-crowd and do Springsteen’s Born in the USA. About an hour into the songfest, someone did an artificially inspirational number from a contemporary musical I wasn’t familiar with.

“Damn” the woman next to me pounded her palm on the top of the bar. “They should outlaw this song from karaoke bars everywhere.” In her mid-twenties, with cornflower blue eyes, pale skin and non-descript brown hair styled in a mullet, she went on to explain. “I come from a small town in Ohio. They sang this damn song at our high school’s graduation for four straight years.”

Those of us within earshot patted her shoulder in consolation. Yes, there ought to be a karaoke law of some sort.

While I did not close the place down, during my night at the lesbian karoke Irish bar, I ended up hearing quite a cavalcade of memory joggers sung by every kind of person you could imagine. After a day in Stroller Village, this was especially heartening.

Seeing that there is a place for EVERYONE, a place of laughter and belonging, is no small thing.