In Mean Girls, the 2004 teen classic, Regina George tells her friend Gretchen that “fetch,” her own unique slang, is never going to become a thing. Turns out she was wrong. Cathy DiToro and her fellow DMV-based musicians honor “fetch” and other cultural touchstones of the early 2000s with their cover band, So Fetch. The five-member act covers songs that were released from January 2000 to December 2010, all in their own 2000s personas—DiToro is Amber Crombie; Jorge Pezzementi is Glenn Coco; Pedro Alfaro goes by Cruz; Eric Taft is Aaron Ryan Hart; and Mark Lepusic is also known as AJ Lachey. However, as DiToro shared with us, there are plenty of ways that So Fetch brings the nostalgia of the 2000s back, and will do so again when they take the stage Feb. 17 at U Street Music Hall in Washington, DC. // 1115A U St. NW, Washington, DC; 7 p.m.; $10
How did you come up with So Fetch?
I’ve been on the cover scene for a while in various cover bands, and I’ve seen how successful the decade bands are, such as the Legwarmers and White Ford Bronco. There wasn’t a 2000s band out yet, and as history tells us, that formula works. So I thought let’s jump on this opportunity and be the first one in the area doing it. I was in middle school and high school around that time, so it’s definitely a time that is very nostalgic for me.
Besides covers, what do you do to create that 2000s feel?
We encourage people to dress up and we do costume contests whenever we can. We all dress up and we do costume changes on our set breaks. We have clips from Mean Girls; we have our intro and outro music, something we put together from TV shows and instrumental tracks and things that reference the 2000s. And I just have a bunch of props on stage—my tiny purse and flip phones that I’ll pass out to people. Really whatever we can do to just enhance the overall, not just make it an audio but visual experience.
What songs get the crowd going?
“Hey Ya!” is usually a crowd pleaser, by OutKast. “The Middle” by Jimmy Eat World goes over really well. Blink-182 goes over really well, “All the Small Things,” everyone gets really into that. And then the other one that we do that everyone really likes is probably Shaggy, “It Wasn’t Me,” because not a lot of bands do that song and Cruz, my bandmate, does a really killer Shaggy impression. It’s cool because he does it so well and that’s just kind of an inappropriate, silly song that people don’t expect, so it’s fun for us.
