October 7th, 2019. Teavolve’s Amazing.

Tonight was probably one of the best Teavolve’s ever – or at least certainly one of the best in a while. Absolutely stunning lineup. Great audience, fantastic featured artist in the form of Jeff Miller. A great combination of people who’ve become recent regulars and long-missed surprises.

Nelson Emokpae’s wife came out – welcome Kendra!

It had STARTED as kind of a hard one as I’d set aside time to meet up with someone who wanted to pick my brain about starting a new Baltimore open mic. We’d chatted last week and I figured it’d be a great thing to also be able to SHOW what I was talking about. Since one of the woman’s watchwords in our conversation had been “diversity” I was especially glad that we reflected exactly that tonight (hey, you can’t plan that in advance to effectively!)… I’d done some research, written up a little document, and put some thought into it all and then she… didn’t show.

By around 5.30pm everything started to happen at the same time. I had gotten there an hour early, but now was a half hour late in my setting up because of a table that wasn’t clearing out, and when they FINALLY left, of course that’s when my first couple of people start showing up… setting up while making them feel welcome at least gave the open-mic-curious woman (who showed up shortly before 6pm) a real grasp of what it can actually BE like… an irate phone call at 6 that promised to be “just a sec” dragged on, multiple new people, Sharif coming in with his keys… it just got complicated very swiftly. I didn’t set up my cameras as well as I’d hoped, my webstream died AGAIN because I didn’t plug something in right… just… it started off very stressful.

And then – man, it was absolutely BEAUTIFUL.

During the open mic the weather picked up with some pretty fearsome madness. Very, very heavy wind whipping rain and temporary stop signs down the street, emphasizing the irony of a night crew of power washers out and about…