Livingston's Way Out West: Tambourine Misuse Syndrome: Death by a million shakes

Left to Right: Chris, Olivia, Michael, Ellen, Maggie, and Jason down in front

Friday night after we got back from Hollywood, a babysitter showed up at the house and the adults took off for downtown Los Angeles!

Dinner was at Takami, a Japanese steak and sushi restaurant on the 21^st floor of a building and it had an awesome open-air rooftop lounge where we thankfully showed up during happy hour ($4 appetizers and drink specials). I was peer pressured into trying sushi for the first time and I found something I didn’t mind too much (calamari was good and the tuna roll wasn’t bad either), but the raw stuff was not for me. Sorry, Charlie.

I was contemplating whether or not I should spit out the raw fish in my mouth

At some point during dinner, I had this amazing (AMAZING!) idea to go do karaoke after dinner. Chris & Maggie were karaoke newbies and a smidge reluctant, but entered into their new life (Karaoke King and Queen) with gusto and have now officially been converted into people who live, love, and laugh for their next karaoke fix.

Jason & Olivia have friends who are in the “karaoke know” so they did some quick texting to find out the best place for us to go near our restaurant and we discovered “Feel Karaoke” in KoreaTown (K Town). This place was awesome! I’ve never seen or heard of a place like this near Nashville—you are in your own private karaoke lounge. There are a bunch of rooms, each with their own big couch an a TV on each wall and you get a couple of tambourines and 2 microphones in each room. SO….the only people doing karaoke with us or listening to our karaoke were the 6 people in our group. Genius!

The tambourines were a great addition to the karaoke vibe we had going. The only problem is that some of us were a little exuberant with our tambourine shaking and woke up the next day with bruises and tender spots on our hands—tambourine injuries, if you will. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of TMS (Tambourine Misuse Syndrome), but it’s a real thing and it’s affecting more people than you probably realize. My hope for this blog post is to bring TMS into the light, get people talking about it and take the shame out of it for those suffering with TMS.

I’m going to dedicate the rest of our LWOW trip to those suffering with TMS and would like to ask for you to challenge yourself to start thinking about TMS differently— If we can get on the same page about TMS, we can change the world, one shake at a time.