It was an unforgettable night for one woman who decided to belt out a Blink-182 song during karaoke — only to discover that lead singer Tom DeLonge was “watching, waiting, commiserating” her performance.
In video shared on TikTok by Kyle @WebsiteLandlord, Monica Gill, dressed in a bikini T-shirt, brought out her inner rock star to sing “All the Small Things” at a bar in Palm Springs, California.
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WATCH HEREWhile she's singing, the video pans to DeLonge sitting at one of the tables and nodding his head. At one point, she emo screams and DeLonge bursts out in laughter.
“She had no idea the guy who wrote that song was sitting right there. I told her and her friends and they lost their minds,” Kyle captioned his video.
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Gill tells TODAY.com that she loves to dance and have fun with her longtime college friends — Mary O’Donohue, Michaela McDermott, Shelley Glynn and Julie Shearer — who try to get together every couple of years for a trip.
They stumbled into the bar and her friends “immediately” went straight towards the karaoke booth to pick songs, she says, while she grabbed drinks. “We were there, I don’t know, 15 minutes maybe, and our song came on.”
Gill was the only one to go up and knew the song well enough as a Blink-182 fan. She says because she’s not a singer, she likes to “up” the show in other ways.
“Ninety-nine percent of the things that I do, I do for my own entertainment,” she says. “So I started singing to them, and then I was like, I need to throw some screamo stuff in here. Why not?”
Kyle tells TODAY.com that he knew DeLonge was there “the whole time” but had a feeling Gill and her friends didn’t.
“I noticed that she started singing in a big way too, but I saw that her eyes were looking at her friends the whole time,” he says. “I had a feeling she didn’t really know, because none of her friends were looking over at Tom DeLonge or anything. So I was like, I think I should probably tell them.”
Kyle and Gill didn’t know each other, but connected after he told her that DeLonge was there and his videos of her doing karaoke went viral.
After his TikTok followers requested to see more footage, he shared a second clip that was just as amusing.
In the video, Gill starts singing, “Late night, come home,” before really putting her screamo voice behind the next lyrics, “Work sucks!”
Kyle's video then pans over to DeLonge who has a quizzical face.
“I didn’t really realize that I was in such a ... viral moment at the time,” he says. “I couldn’t wait to tell them... it was one of the most satisfying moments of my life.”
After Kyle told her and her friends that DeLonge was in the bar, they ran over to him.
“I kind of blacked out a little bit because I was so starstruck,” Gill says. “I just remember saying to him, ‘I didn’t know you were here. I wouldn’t have made a mockery out of your song.’”
Gill jokes that she thinks she “scared him a little bit, but that’s OK.”
“I said to him, ‘I really wanted it to have a lot of angst in it.’ And he was like, ‘OK?’” she adds. “I feel like Tom was equal parts bewildered, confused and amused.”
One of Gill's friends was able to snap a photo of the post-karaoke singing interaction, which Kyle shared on his TikTok for invested fans.
Because of the attention that her viral moment was receiving, Gill made her own TikTok account and shared a video that her friends took of her performance.
“We love shenanigans,” Gill says of her and her friends. “We’re just fun-loving people, we love life and we love being together. So we were having a great time.”
This article originally appeared on TODAY.com. Read more from TODAY:
