Notebook : pages 35-36

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At the Open Mic works as a distillation both of fond adolescent memories and my general philosophy on conversation and social interaction. Positive feedback is good; the tact and civlity to shut your mouth and let things slide if you're not interested is grand.

When I first started playing guitar and writing songs, early in high school, I lost my performative virginity by playing the first song I'd written to the ten other folks at the tiny creative-writing workshop a teacher had been running each week. The next year, I helped organize a weekly-ish open mic poetry thing that went down either in the school library or in one of the science classrooms, lunchtime or just after school. It was great for me, socially, since I was a pretty inward kid growing up.

Some of the regulars at the school open mic also hit the weekly open mic night at the (now defunct) Cafe Lena on SE 26th and Hawthorne, and they invited me along. The school thing had been good for me, but this was something else entirely: grizzled or frantic or pretentious or genuinely crazy (with a fair share of overlap) poets and artsy types doing their thing to a tiny, packed coffeehouse crowd. It was simultaneously terrifying and liberating—here was a crowd that might not always approve but was by convention, by unspoken social code, willfully tolerant.

Which is a great environment for social growth, in creative contexts and others. It's not a great avenue for critical feedback, and shouldn't be mistaken for one, but it has tremendous merit for someone as gunshy as I once was—I don't know that I'd be making music today if I hadn't had that sort of supportive, just-do-you-thing environment to stretch my legs in.

And it's a really catchy song.