With Apologies to Kurt Vonnegut
About a year ago, a little guitar shop opened up a couple blocks from our house. It was in the mini-est of mini strip malls. The people also rented the space next to their shop. They used it for a modest coffee house and general hang out for people in the community. They sold drip coffee and cokes and snacks and had comfy couches and a stage, which they used for an open mic night two nights a week.
The family and I attended one of these and it was a nice, cheap night out for us in a place that didn’t mind the toddler running around. The entertainment was exactly what you’d expect from a community open mic in a room with no alcohol, which is fine with me. I asked the lady if anybody ever did standup, or if it was mostly college boys doing John Mayer and Dads doing Don Henley. She said no one had yet, but that I was welcome to try.
So a few months later I finally got around to putting something together. It took me that long because I got distracted changing diapers. We didn’t attend another open mic after that first one because we have an infant and a toddler, and having fun is not something you do at that point in your life, not that close to bedtime (We paid for that first night dearly. I saw Evie eating the chocolate cake, but by bedtime she was behaving as though she freebased it.).
Yesterday I called them several times to try to get on the list in advance. No one answered. I thought, “They are busy selling a lot of guitars or are having a particularly rowdy bout of colitis and just happen to be in the john all five times I’ve called.”
So, after staying up until 1:30am the night before rehearsing my act in my garage into the handle of a screw driver, I got my self together and headed over. When I arrived there were two teenage boys sitting in the coffee house just having finished a guitar lesson next door. The lights were down and no one else was there. I finally found the owner and she said they closed the doors of the coffee house side at the first of the month because people stopped coming. She said they opened their doors the very day the economy started its nosedive. After commiserating with each other for a few minutes, I came back home and wrestled with my daughter. She peed on me.
God is the only poet, and he likes his humor black.
