Hi everyone — it means a lot that you’re here.
Wednesday, mid-October, 1996, 7:45pm
Keene State College
Keene, New Hampshire
I was walking across campus, carrying my guitar.
The sound of dead leaves crunching at my feet.
Butterflies reign supreme over my stomach.
I kept forgetting to breathe.
I wanted to turn back, but something inside of me
kept me moving forward.
To pump myself up, I said to myself,
“This is the first step toward your destiny.”
I was always good at doing stuff like that to comfort myself.
It was the first on-campus open mic of the semester.
They had been promoting it around campus for over a month.
I went to one of these the year before.
A classmate I knew read a poem and barked like a dog.
Surprisingly to me, he received a standing ovation.
That memory was etched in my brain.
Getting in front of crowds had always
scared the living daylights out of me.
But if the college crowd went wild over a guy
barking like a dog, imagine what they’d think of me.
That summer, I bought an acoustic guitar.
I used it more like a percussion instrument.
I got good at knocking on the wood.
If anything, I knew it’d be a great protective shield.
When I arrived for school that autumn,
I signed up last minute for a one-credit
“Learn to Play Guitar” class
with a terrific music professor on campus.
In those first six weeks, we learned a handful of chords.
I wrote two original songs I planned on performing that night:
one was about a man falling in love with a refrigerator;
another was an epic about a girl who was my “Candy Bar.”
I entered the mellow student center and headed
up the stairs to the second floor.
The smell of freshly popped popcorn filled the air.
The sounds of people talking and guitars tuning grew
as I got closer to the Nite Owl Café.
I snaked through the crowd to the sign-up sheet
and put my name down.
I felt a hand on my back.
I turned to see the bearded graduate student
who ran the café, with a friendly smile on his face.
“Wade, so happy to see you here.”
Now feeling a little less nervous,
I found a seat toward the right of the stage.
A fellow open mic-er with a bowl haircut and thick glasses,
sat beside me strumming a Beck song.
“Sounds good.” I said.
He grinned at me and went back to warming up.
I put a peppermint Halls cough drop into my mouth
and took a deep breath.
“This is the first step toward your destiny.”
________
Thanks for reading!
Best,
Adam