Dear Linens ‘n’ Things,
This past weekend, rather than a wild night out in Manhattan and Brooklyn, I stayed on Long Island and grabbed some tea with a couple of my friends. Don’t let how low-key that sounds fool you. It was a good time.
First, we tried to go to a café in St. James. However, when we got there, we discovered it was open mic night. It’s a pretty tiny place and every seat was taken, so we decided to go elsewhere.
Besides, letting me watch an open mic night is usually a pretty bad idea, since 99.99% of the performers are fairly cringe-worthy (at least on Long Island) and I have a bad habit of saying anything that pops into my head without thinking. It’s a terrible, but often hilarious, combination. Once I went to an open mic at a coffeehouse in Wantagh where this skinny, nerdy dude with an acoustic guitar, calling himself My Mother’s Boyfriend, or some other egregiously emo name, took the stage. He was awful. I can’t recall what I said exactly, but I mocked him to my friends the entire night, unaware that he could hear me up on stage. He gave me the dirtiest look when I left. And in high school, my best friend worked at a bakery with a cafe attached, where they’d often host open mic nights for music and sometimes comedy. That’s where I learned that musicians don’t like it when you yell “American Pie!” or “Free Bird!” at them from the back of the room.
A Series of Open Letters to Entirely Random People 