November 5th, 2024. Election Day Blues at the SPARK w Robert Lighthouse.

Kristen didn’t want to stay home and stare at the TV waiting for results, so she came to the open mic with me. We went and got lunch before heading over the School of Musical Traditions and this little guy spent lunch with us! Bee petting has become my new favourite way to harass the wildlife and I took his torpor as consent.

Tongue-in-cheek title aside, I don’t have a good feeling about the upcoming election. I try to make my open mics safe spaces for ALL comers, but ESPECIALLY on the political front there have been people I’ve had to ban because they got TOO stupid, and there were actions taken, and shit that downwardly went. Whether it was that one guy who just wanted to make a big deal over how he should be able to use the N-word at a Black-owned teahouse since it was “historically accurate”, or the people who just want to lean too heavily into the “GET IT? I’m talking about YOU” fight-picking… or my first real Trumper who kept yelling “I bet YOU’D like it they grabbed YOUR pussy!!” to the guy who I had to kick out in Takoma Park cause he was waving a knife while spouting anti-Semetic poetry yelling “YOU’RE THE NAZI HERE!!! WHEN I COME BACK WITH MY GUN THAT’S FREE SPEEEEEACH!!!”… to having to paint over the chalkboard walls at Morsbergers because people needed to draw dicks and racial slurs…

There’s a lot of stupidity in the world and there IS a difference between free speech and picking a fight. Yeah, the mic is open… but I’ll close it if you can’t respect it. I don’t care what it is OUT THERE. THIS… this right here?

It’s not a democracy.

And so I laid out some rules for a Takoma Park open mic on election night. We can play political songs, but I don’t want to talk about it. Juels? Shut up about the Senate. I don’t care about WHY you wrote the song. Just play it.

You’ve gone and voted, or you haven’t. You’ve done what you can do. We won’t know the results before we’re done for the night. Put your damned phones away. Don’t check the news. Don’t update those around you. We’re just playing to one another.

I’d also decided NOT to have a featured artist and was fairly pissed off when David booked Robert Lighthouse just a couple of days ago. I felt that a) I wanted it to be “just us”. A family night, kinda. B) I really did NOT have faith that Takoma Park was going to want to do this, and expected them all to be glued to their televisions (and indeed, a good number of people who tuned into the webcast said they’d ACTUALLY been looking for election coverage and found us instead) which meant that we were setting the feature up for playing to an empty room. And c) I always feel weird laying down content rules for the feature and CERTAINLY didn’t want to say “Hey, Robert, last time you did some great storytelling about Ukraine and I know you have an important perspective about it – but not tonight, okay?”

I didn’t have to do that. David actually talked to Robert. And the night was everything I could’ve hoped. We played to each other. We shut the world out.

For tonight at least, let’s just pretend it’s all okay.

We do this every Tuesday. Signup before 7. I start at 7. 7112 Willow Avenue in Takoma Park, MD. robsopenmics.ilyaimy.com for more information. For information about the photos and videos and usage thereof, please click here!