Over the past three years Rowan and I have hosted a virtual open mic every Monday. It started shortly after COVID really hit us – but I must admit, I took a little convincing.
The moment my Monday open mic was canceled 2 weeks in a row, a number of people from my Teavolve community in Baltimore started bugging me: “how’re you going to keep things going!?” – so I can’t completely take credit for this THING that’s been running 160 weeks or so in a row. I certainly can’t take credit for it in the past year.
Once we were back to in-person open mics I rapidly ran out of time and patience for the virtual iteration (VOM), but Rowan and our friend Chris Ehrich, with equal parts help and hindrance from Juels, and a regular cast of characters – felt that it was important enough, valuable enough, to keep going. They host every Monday, while I’ve “retired” from the VOM and just pay the bills!
But I DO know it’s been really valuable for a number of people all across the country, and in some respects, has fulfilled my ideals of connecting disparate people even more successfully than my “real” open mics have with regulars from Missouri, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Washington state, and of course the Maryland core here near Baltimore.
And Oklahoma.
This trip has allowed me to be face-to-face with a number of the VOMlings, and that’s been beautiful – but when I looked at a map and saw how close we were to Grover in Oklahoma, we couldn’t NOT go.
Grover first found the VOM the week before Christmas in December of 2021 and quickly became a regular. He took some good and not-so-good-natured ribbing from the Blue State regulars because he was from Oklahoma, an ex-marine (are you really ever ex?), had an American flag hanging behind him, and in short wasn’t “one of us” – and yet isn’t that what all of this is all about? Frankly, that less-than-generous initial response from some of the other VOMlings is one of the things that has soured me on online interactions and accelerated my departure.
But I tried to make sure I was encouraging both in front of and behind the scenes, and more importantly HE persevered. We talked a lot offline as well as during the VOM. Wishes and dreams and his farm and his illness – a deterioration of his lungs caused by chemical exposure in the military that had him in line for a lung transplant that would actually probably take place local to us at Johns Hopkins.
A couple of weeks before we left on this trip his hopes of this were dashed as his doctors discovered cancer metastasizing through his lungs and body, knocking him off the donor list and viciously shortening his expected Life span. Looking at the map and the calendar, there was no way we could be so close to his hospital (and by the time we could got there, hospice) and NOT visit this man who we’d seen 30+ times at the VOM in the past 2 years.
Last night we drove south west from our show in Columbia, off into the darkness to the edge of Missouri to put us in striking distance of Grove, Oklahoma so that today we could get up and drive to visit Grover and his wife Kat. We had no idea what we were REALLY getting into, but I thought it was important to do and when I’d approached Heather about going 10 hours round trip out of our way to visit a man we’d never met before she didn’t flinch.
“Of course we do that.”
It was a good visit. We told stories and sang together. His wife, Kat, is amazing and they have roughly a billion dogs and chickens and kittens and goats roaming around. We talked and we laughed a lot and we cried a bit too. All to the background hiss of the oxygen that he has been plugged into for nearly 20 years.
We hung around long enough to join first his veterans’ group open mic and then surprised everyone by joining the VOM. We played “everything hurts” (cause it does) with a sweet moment where he not only sang along, but leaned over to Heather and told her she could beat on his guitar since we didn’t bring in the cajon – and we played “Oklahoma Revival” cause that’s where we were, and he sang along to that too (Heather had scribbled out the words to the choruses for him). And then we wrapped out the set playing “Fire and Rain” for him and Heather to sing together.
It was a good thing.
