Strummer, Man

I took what I hope you'll forgive my calling my sorry ass out for the evening. There's an open mike night every Sunday at the Kennett Flash, a new music venue here in my town, and a bass player friend is interested in taking our jazz-duo act on the road, so I checked it out.

And lo, the variety of strummers that I did see! Tall strummers, short strummers, fat strummers, skinny strummers, boy strummers, girl strummers, old strummers, young strummers. Everyone strumming on guitars, and once in a while they tootled on harmonicas too, but everyone strummed.

Actually it wasn't bad. If you go to open mike (I refuse to write "mic") nights, you know they typically range from not bad to make it stop. This was mostly in the not-bad range. Most people did a creditable job, some of the songs were affecting, and I had a perfectly pleasant time for the four bucks I paid.

Mostly what struck me is how and why people find their way onto a stage. More and more we live in a mediated world where everything you say and do is public, or seems so. But these people were getting on a real stage, singing and playing real songs to real people close enough that you could hit them with a playing card if you spun it at them at all well. Five, ten, fifteen feet away. I spend a lot of my time in the wired world and so do you, and it's easy to forget that this goes on a lot, because people want and need it.

One kid was maybe a sophomore in high school, short, skinny, jeans and T-shirt, mane of dark hair to his shoulders and an immense orange ball cap he seemed barely capable of supporting the weight of. I thought of him going down the hall at school, amid the surging mass of other kids; you wouldn't see him at all. But here, he was on stage, with the blue and purple lights on him, singing and strumming, and not doing a bad job. I thought of him sitting in his bedroom for hours, practicing. And he was up there, putting his two tunes over pretty well, a measure of authority in his work. Good for you, I thought.

Another guy came up and sang an original song, "Amish Girl," and it was good enough that I laughed out loud at lyrics like, "It really makes my windmill turn, the way you work that butter churn." More strummers were coming in the door, so I decided to leave on a high note and bugged out. But I'm going to tell my friend that we should definitely play at this venue. Variety is the spice of life, and there can be such a thing as a surfeit of strummers. That's how I feel, anyway.