The Gladstone Hotel is an arts centre as well as being a place to check in and get some zzzzzzs. Of course, that was the plan when the current owners bought the place some years ago and began its transformation from a pestilent Parkdale dump to its present incarnation. I've attended art shows, book launches, assorted readings and all manner of higher brow events there. I've also enjoyed the low brow stuff on offer - specifically karaoke nights with Peter Styles in the hotel's Melody Bar: no small irony that. Virtually everyone with enough drink inside them to venture going on stage couldn't carry a tune in a bucket despite their their pretensions to rock star or diva-dom. There was the fellow - for some reason I seem to think he was Iranian - who stood on stage bewildered and awkward and moved his lips but not so much as a single note came out. Someone should have explained to him the difference between karaoke and lip synching. Or what about the tough looking woman who dressed in cowboy shirts and sang CCR songs and only CCR songs. And I've lost count of the number of drunken frat boys and sorority girls I've heard screeching out their favourite tunes. Well, sadly, it's all over. Karoke at the Gladstone wraps up tonight after a 10-year run, although surely it will become the stuff of Hogtown musical legend, keeping company with the likes of the Last Pogo at the Horseshoe and Stompin' Tom Connors at The Matador Club.
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