Get on the stage

It is mid-evening on a rainy Thursday night, and in the basement of the Smith building, Wonder Woman has just taken the stage.

She smiles coyly at the audience in the darkened dining room of the Food for Thought Cafe, and silently begins to shave her armpits. Welcome to open mic night.

Her shaving act was part of the Thursday open mic night hosted by the Popular Music Board, Food for Thought and Pathos Literary Magazine. The now-weekly event has been running regularly since the beginning of March and takes place every Thursday at 7 p.m.

Before Wonder woman took the stage, Portland State students performed several short acoustic guitar sets and spoken word pieces. Most participants that evening stuck with the usual themes that haunt the average college student: being poor, stressed out, looking for love and meaning.

The hipster-beards and sneakers that took their turns on stage (with the exception of Wonder Woman, who was neither bearded nor wearing sneakers) were actually universally decent that evening. There were some false starts here and there as guitars were tuned or lyrics forgotten, but the vibe from the audience was welcoming and forgiving.

Hardly surprising, considering many audience members were participants, or friends of participants–a point that did not go unnoticed by the few outsiders who showed up.

“It seemed like it would be more fun if you knew everyone,” said visiting 20-year-old Portland Community College student Katrina Griffiths, gathering her things to leave halfway through the session. “It seemed definitely more like an insider show.”

With that kind of intimacy, the barrier between the stage and the audience was a thin one. Instruments were sometimes shared between separate performers, jokes exchanged and “guest” singers recruited to join in at the mic. For those familiar with the scene and their fellow performers, this was a three-hour jam session in someone’s kitchen-but this kitchen has a $10,000 sound system.

The Popular Music Board’s Sound Production Coordinator, Reid McCarger, said that while they try to keep the open-mic format as free form as possible, the amount of structure they maintain is determined by how many people show up.

When the doors opened last Thursday, there were only a handful of names on the sign-up sheet. “When it’s busy we try to limit people to eight minutes,” McCarger said, “but on a night like this, it’s pretty laid back.”

McCarger said that the popularity of the open mic, now in its sixth week of existence, changes based on the academic schedule.

“On the second night we did this, we had 20 people sign up,” he said, but added that during finals week of winter term, the attendance was low.

The audience Thursday was just as casual as the performance schedule, but by the mid-show intermission, most of the tables and couches in the sunken dining room were full. Interested students came and went as the night wore on, some bringing their own food and beverages, many making use of Food For Thought’s water cups. Curiously, the cafe itself was closed down, in spite of the obvious natural pairing of audience members and concessions.

Back on stage, the red-and blue-clad woman finishes up her pit-job, eyebrow raised as she tosses the razor backhandedly to her left and smirks: “That’s how fuckin’ Wonder Woman shaves her armpits.”

Open mic night

Thursdays at 7 p.m. in SMSU room 26. The event is free and open to all-ages. All interested participants are encouraged to attend, and as the flyer states: “anything and everything is welcome.”