If you've been to Montero Bar and Grill in Brooklyn Heights on a Thursday, Friday, or best of all, a Saturday night, then you've seen and heard Amethyst Valentino, karaoke host extraordinaire. And once she's tossed you a tambourine so you can jingle along with a stranger's song, or playfully chided you for jumping up and down mid-performance (Montero's is in an old building), or brought the house down with a song of her own (these days, she's a big fan of Olivia Rodrigo's "Vampire"), you'll never forget the night you spent in her thrall, hanging on her every word, breathlessly waiting to be called to take the microphone.
On a recent Saturday night, when temperatures hovered in the low teens and gray, fossilized snow clogged the streets, one might have imagined Montero's would have been empty. "It's dead tonight," Valentino texted me around 8 p.m., as I headed to the bar. But by the time I arrived half an hour later, two-thirds of the coathooks were occupied, and people were already handing Valentino, who was sporting her signature black glasses, pale yellow slips of paper to get on line for a song. "Thank you, Amethyst," one woman cooed at Valentino, as she sat at her perch—a folding table with a laptop, a tip jar, a huge jug of hand sanitizer, golf pencils, and her mixer, all tucked next to a stack of beer boxes. Others stopped to give her a hug, even if they weren't singing.