52 New Things -- Week 21 -- Open Mic Night

Of all the new things I've tried in the past five months, this was the scariest . . . scarier than facing a room full of kindergarteners . . . scarier than finding a tick near my girlie parts . . . scarier than having my eyebrow hairs ripped out en mass . . .

I sang at open mic night.

If you're one of my old camp friends or church friends, you're probably thinking it's no big deal, but I haven't really played guitar since I left my job at Ascension back in 2010. Ditto with public singing.

But I saw my trivia buddy Nick playing guitar in a picture on his Facebook page, and I said we should do a guitar trio (including the Delecta Daddy, too) at a local coffee shop's open mic night sometime. Nick was all over it and started sending me song suggestions almost immediately. Kevin? Not so into the idea. He's pretty darn good on guitar, but it turns out he's not so fond of playing in front of people. Bummer.

The show must go on, so Nick and I decided on a song and practiced for a whopping half hour the night before.

We got there half an hour early to sign up. We took slot number four, not wanting to be first but not wanting to be nervous for too long.

The first guy up was a wanna-be comedian. Second? A girl who I'm guessing was just learning to play her guitar. Going after either of those two would have been awesome. But the third act to go up had three people playing guitar, mandolin, and accordian. Crap! They were going to be awesome and we were going to be boring comparatively.

Turns out they were not awesome, just okay, and barely audible. Yay for us! So up we went with my nervous stomach and shaking knees . . . Nick appeared to be calm, cool, and collected! I figured it didn't really matter if I screwed up royally because we were packing the U-Haul and leaving town the next day . . . I could drive my embarrassed self away and never look back!

Our friend and fellow Roaring Cheetah trivia teammate A.J. put together an awesome video (either she's amazingly skilled or has too much time on her hands, I'm not sure), but I cannot for the life of me get this blog to show it. You can go watch it on my Facebook page or cut and paste this link into your browser:

https://www.facebook.com/video/embed?video_id=10100258964570179

I know you're probably disappointed that I didn't royally screw it up -- I can see how many people read my blog posts each week, and I get way more hits on the ones where I write about hurting or embarrassing myself! I bet you all watch America's Funniest Home Videos and Wipeout, too, don't you? You just looooove laughing at the misfortune of others! ;)  Don't worry -- I get it. I'm a fan of laughing, too. I'll try to find something funny to write about soon. 'Til then, rock on, friends.