Gitcher Geetars...

As many of you know, I plays me a little music. I used to play more back in the old days before kids and hubby and homeschooling etc. When I was in college there was an open mic that I frequented on Tuesday nights at a little bar near my apartment. I was a regular, and it seemed I wrote a new song a week and got up there and sang it. I usually sang it well, I can't say much for my guitar playing though, but I had to have backup, so I did the best I could with what little guitar talent I had. They called me "Bottom of the Bucket Newton" because the host would draw names out of a bucket to order the performers, and I was almost always chosen last. Usually the morose heroin addict with his battered notebook full of disturbing poetry was at the top of the list. He usually traded places with me, so that I could go on early. Most people were leaving as he was bloviating at 2 am. I guess he didn't mind, he wasn't really there at that point either.

After a couple of years I stopped playing open mics. Many things came together at that point to send me in a different direction. The first was meeting Hubby. I would take him with me to the open mics and he would sit there with a matchbook in his hand lighting one match after the other, watching them flame up and burn down. I thought he was trying to be all rebel-without- a-cause for me. You know, bad boy, leather jacket, fire.... Really it was a thing with crowds. Hubby doesn't like them, and he bore it in silence for me. He also had to deal with an ex-boyfriend of mine who would sit at the bar and glare at him. Not that Hubby couldn't kick his butt, it's just that the ex-boyfriend usually started crying at some point. That was just too weird. So he threw me over his shoulder and dragged me out of it all. It was all okay with me, cause he was sexy and stuff.

Funny little side story:

When I was still jailbait, and Hubby didn't know me, I used to sing in a band. We played a local club called Planet Earth fairly frequently. The bands would play upstairs, afterwards there was usually an industrial dance night downstairs. One night we were playing and began to smell smoke. We lost our crowd, but were never told to evacuate. Later we found out some moron downstairs had set a couch on fire behind the building.

Many years later, when Hubby and I were still new, he told me about his Planet Earth days. He used to frequent the Industrial Dance nights. He could put up with a crowd if he was stomping and pushing people around for fun. He also had a thing for girls who lined their eyes thickly and wore a lot of black. He told me one night, before the "music" started pumping, he was hanging out with one of those goth-girls in the back stairwell. Maybe the smell of leather and cloves made him anxious, because he was lighting matches and throwing them out the window unaware of the highly flammable couch below. Good thing I didn't meet him then. Not because I was supposed to think he was a moron, but because I was just 16 he was really cute.


Yes, it's a long story, but it's prelude to something else. I have this crazy idea about starting another blog (great way to treat an internet addiction, huh?). It will be a Tuesday Night Open Mic where folks can submit their own audio or video files for me to post. It needs a name first, then I can take some time and figure out the details.

So why Tuesday nights? Well that's just selfish I guess. I used to play the open mics on Tuesdays. Oh, and TV sucks on Tuesday night.

There were a lot of things I didn't like about open mics. Many would agree with me that you had to sit through a lot of crap before someone would get on and actually entertain you. That wouldn't happen in the blog world. I think people would spend their time adjusting the mic before they press record, and if you happen to dislike what they were playing, there's a little button you can push to shut them up. Then you can go to your own free bar, pour yourself a Sam Adams and fire up the next one.

Let me add something here. There are also a great deal of unexpected little gems at open mics. I remember Mindy Smith played at the one I did. She was very shy and unassuming and she wouldn't play her guitar. She used it as a cane. The first time I saw her, I thought, "oh no, here comes another asthmatic squeaker to sing a Janis Ian song." Then she started to sing. She did sing cautiously and quietly, but that was fine because the crowd had a good dose of the shut-up as soon as she had her first word out. That was probably another reason I stopped playing the open mics. I didn't want to be anywhere near her on the list.

Okay, my open mic blog needs a name. If you have any name ideas or suggestions on how to put the thing together, just leave them in the comments section.