But sweet Jenn Eyre, pure of heart and clear of shoe as she is, doesn't bat an eye, and explains that she's there for practice. "You sing?" "I sort of sing." "Well?" "Not terribly well, no." Which is pretty awesome of her to say. "We'll be the judge of that," precious. She says the thing about embarrassing herself again, making it clear that she thinks she is the Princess of Wonderful Singing but simply too modest to say so. But then she actually does embarrass herself: "When I saw Matt onstage, and he was singing? And he was doing great," like he needs her to validate his amazing talent, "it did inspire me, and it made me nervous at the same time, because," get this, "I haven't done half the things that he's done, to get where he's at." And the punchline: "Or even attempted to." It's the ways in which Jenn's kind of self-aware that make me like her at all. But, sadly, it's the ways in which she is not that will ultimately result in her murder. She realigns this whole venture in this moment -- an interview, remember, meaning that it takes place after the auto-da-fe we're about to witness -- to the tired old Road Rules line about how the point wasn't to succeed so much as it was to prove to herself that she could do it. Which is always patent bullshit. ["Also, on some level she clearly thinks her own incompetence is cute and appealing, which bugs." -- Sars] Matt "Velvet" Dusk soothes her troubled feelings and tries to get her to sing "They Can't Take That Away From Me" with him. They're alternating lines, okay, but after every line he sings, he has to physically point out the next line for her to sing. Like, she never really understands the totally arbitrary pattern he's throwing at her. She doesn't sing...truly badly. No. She sings like...it's like, "sexy" and "breathy" and not very in tune. While this is going on, we get shots of every single member of the band, and Wolfie, looking like they're about to vomit.

When the song goes higher, she jumps into this weird Betty Boop/She's So Unusual register with this trembling vibrato that I can see possibly working, for someone that can actually sing. Matt "Velvet" Dusk asks them to transpose down a little bit, because it's obviously painful for him to have her doing that thing so close to him. "I don't think this key is going to work." He's being so damn nice. Maybe this is what comes after the "Fuck It" phase: taking any excuse whatsoever to keep from working, like walking this little girl through an incredibly easy song, just to get back at the Tim and Tom Connection and Joe the Vet. Who right now is probably still drunk upstairs, so he doesn't know or care about this letter-of-the-law insurrection, but whatever. "You're a soprano, right? Or an...alto?" He's running out of options. "An ostrich? An archipelago?" She's like, "I don't know what I am." I bet they teach you that kind of stuff when you "go to have classes." But the best, the best part, is when he tries to harmonize with her -- on the line "the way you sing off-key," no less -- and it literally grabs hold of her voice and stretches it up, up toward his, into these in-between limbo regions nobody's ever really sung in before. My spectacles shatter, like in a Marx brothers movie. Matt "Velvet" Dusk starts apologizing to her, basically, saying that it's hard when you're thrown into a situation like that. The other band members start smoking heroin right there. Wolfie starts yelling in what is definitely a British accent, but I have no reason to know which one. Liverpool? Manchester? It sounds kind of dumb. Anyway, he's yelling about how she needs to know the whole song when she comes back to Zax. In interview, Matt "Velvet" Dusk demonstrates that the Ego part and the Fuck It part are wrestling, because he's slowly realizing that it's possible she will ruin his entire career and life simply by occupying the same stage as him.