A few weeks ago, I attended the open mike at the Harvest Cafe in Hudson. (Brief plug: I love this place. The owner is a sweetheart, the food is excellent. Visit them whenever you can.) This open mike is typically run by my old pal Steve Howard, but he was absent on this particular night, and in addition, the open mike was a benefit for the Hudson Food Pantry. So there was something of a crowd, and the crowd was buzzing.
All this threw me off my game.
What sort of game can you possibly have at an open mike, for heaven’s sake, you ask? Frankly, I’m surprised at you. At its core, once you strip away all the community and coffee and cookies, an open mike is an experience in entertainment Darwinism. This is your shot. You’re in the room with lots of other musicians, and perhaps (if you’re lucky) people who are just there to listen. Do you stand out? Are you memorable? People in audience typically make a decision about you a very short time after you get up on stage – long before you finish your song, and sometimes before you even start. Intimidated yet?
So here I am, in the suburbs, in the middle of a food pantry benefit. Not the most snark-friendly of locations; will this audience get my stuff? I’ve got a gig here in a couple weeks. What if the owner hears me and hates me? Looks like everyone’s getting three songs. Wow, the woman before me has a spectacular set of pipes. And – where’s her second song? No, she’s only doing one. My turn!
And I panicked.
In my case, what “panic” means is that I didn’t do my act. I opened with a song that, if you weren’t paying a lot of attention, could have been written by anybody. I was not distinctive. I did not claim the stage. In short, I was just another guy. Now, I realized this after the first song, and I did more of my act in the second and third songs, but still, not enough of it.
As I sat down, cursing myself, a few people complimented me on my performance energy (literate, resonant, exuberant, right?). I mean, I’ve been doing this long enough so that I’m incapable of actually stinking up the joint. But as I watched the rest of the evening, and thought back to all the people who had performed before me, I noticed that unlike me, the vast majority of them remembered that first lesson of stagecraft: do your act, dammit. That’s the act you practice, it’s the one you’re best at, it’s the one that showcases what’s special about you. If you’ve crafted your act appropriately, it casts you in the best light you can possibly be cast. And unless you’re a performing genius, you’re not going to do any better at the spur of the moment. So do your act. Trust the audience. Most of the time, they’ll meet you there – just like they did for all the open mikers. Had I only noticed in advance.
Two weeks later, at my actual gig at the Harvest Cafe, nobody came. (Where where you? Like I said, the food’s great.) The dining room was, literally, empty. Occasionally, someone would wander over from the lounge area and listen for a couple minutes. And what they saw, when they stopped to listen, was my act.
Do your act.