Evil Dick at Just Plain Folks at the Corner Tavern in New Brunswick, N.J.

It's a long story. It turns out that there is a fellow named Spook Handy who hosts an open mic on Tuesdays in the basement of the Corner Tavern in New Brunswick, NJ. Now, there's also a traveling open mic for songwriters, loosely called Just Plain Folks, that was looking to pass through NJ at about this time and needed a venue for its open mic. So Spook arranged to have the Just Plain Folks open mic be his open mic for the week. There were 37 acts signed up; each did one song only, acoustic only. Besides all of the guitarists, there was a mandolin, a couple of keyboard players, and I had the recorder. I didn't sign up to do an original tune myself because I didn't expect there to be keyboards there. But Evil Dick did Fallin in the acoustic trio format, to which that song is well-suited. I played the Kung tenor recorder (I use a Kung Classica of Pear). The venue was sticky and squashed and could not hold 25 people let alone 37, so once we had played we ended up being forced upstairs and missed most of the acts. But what acts we saw, whether skilled or unskilled, polished or not, had one thing in common: a need to make music. Here's hoping that next time Just Plain Folks comes around they'll be able to find a larger room. They have outgrown the Corner Tavern.