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Make up your own joke: The Kid is Fat Tonight or Turn Me Loose at the All You Can Eat Buffet have both been used.
Then, keep in mind that those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw chicken wings. If you're a Loverboy fan whose age keeps pace with your waist size, just shut up and rock. Mike Reno says he still feels like he's 18 and is still "working for the weekend" - he sings the line over the phone during a recent interview.
As can be heard when Loverboy performs Monday on the Telus Stage as part of Klondike Days, the 46-year-old singer belts out those classic Canadian party anthems with the same passion he did in the early '80s.
He calls it a gift from God.
"I don't know how I do it, either," Reno says. "I go out there every night and sing harder than I ever sang in my life. People tell me that. I just have to go, yeah, baby, I hope it hangs in there. I can't do a halfway show. I have to sing it full out. I have to thank whoever is taking care of me up there, because it is still happening."
It was happening when Loverboy performed here as part of the ill-fated Rockfest '99 - the show that almost never happened. None of the bands had been paid on the last day before the plug was pulled.
Reno recalls, "Sammy Hagar came to me and said, 'What are you going to do, Reno?' And I said, 'I'm going to play my show for the fans. I don't know what you're going to do, Sammy, but we got a crowd to people sitting there who paid to be here.' So we walked on stage and then the people running things wouldn't turn the PA on. Def Leppard had to stand up and say, 'Well, we'll pay for the PA, let's just get that f---ing thing on and get this show going.' You gotta hand it to the bands. I'm not patting myself on the back, but Sammy says, 'Well, I'm going on, too, if you're going on.'
"Some people tried to make it out like Loverboy doesn't play unless they get paid, which is a total bunch of nonsense. All the groups wanted to do was what they always wanted to do, which was play a rock show."
Reno agrees it's not like the old days - no sold-out stadium shows, no private Lear Jet, no five tour busses and no crew of 45 like the band enjoyed during their heyday of '80s excess - which he claims he doesn't miss in any case.
As he puts it, "I'm sitting there having a beer with Sammy Hagar and Def Leppard. Life could be a lot worse."
It's sometimes easy to forget this band was the closest thing to a supergroup Canada ever had during the '80s.
Loverboy had a monster American hit in the making with Turn Me Loose. It could've hit No. 1 were it not for the fact that the song was targeted in the battle between record companies and independent record promoters, as recounted in the book Hitmen. The independent promoters wanted to prove they had the power to ruin a band's career. The record companies, tired of paying what amounted to bribes to get albums promoted, wanted to prove they could promote their own records. Neither view was correct, but Loverboy was selected as the sacrificial lamb. Turn Me Loose quietly slid off the charts.
"Too bad they chose us to do it with," Reno says. "It didn't end our careers. We're still working. It killed Turn Me Loose on the charts - but it's still the most popular song the band plays, the encore that people rip their tops off to."
Unlike many classic rock bands that re-form with only the original drummer, a guy who used to know the brother of the original lead singer and three rent-a-musicians who weren't even born when the band had their last hit, Loverboy continued with all its original members - until last winter. Reno says that the loss of bassist Scott Smith put the future of Loverboy in jeopardy. While on a sailing trip off the San Francisco coast, Smith was swept overboard by an eight-metre wave and never found.
After the search was called off, Reno says he rented tugboats and looked for his friend for days, but to no avail. It took him months before he could sing again. All the letters he got basically said the same thing: "While it was a terrible, terrible tragedy to lose Scott Smith, it would even be a bigger tragedy to lose Loverboy over this. The band left it to me," Reno says. "And I felt we should phone Spider, one of Scott's close friends, to come from Winnipeg and have him come for a little practice session to see if I could even sing these songs again. Spider, being the stand-up guy he is, walked in with Scott's bass and some of Scott's equipment and he said to me, 'Give the bass a hug.'
"And right then it became a little easier for me. We just did a string of concerts in the States and it's not the same, but it's getting a little easier."
Loverboy is on tour now to support its new live album, Live Loud and Loose (1982-1986) - in case you didn't clue in by now that the '80s are back for good - and trying to scrounge up some major label interest for a new studio album.
Meanwhile, Klondike Days. Don't forget your goofy K-Days attire.
"We love Klondike Days," Reno says. "I don't know what I'm wearing. I'll be the skinny guy with the red leather pants and the headband."
Just close your eyes, travel back in time to 1982 and you're there, man.
Admission to Loverboy, on stage at 9 p.m., is free with your K-Days Exposition pass.