Roses are red
Violets are blue
Take your next Tinder date
to an open mic with you
Tim sits at one of the high-top tables in Charmington’s coffee shop in the Charles Village/Remington neighborhood of Baltimore. Charmington’s offers an open mic on the last Tuesday of every month and anyone is welcome to perform.
From beneath his tattered baseball cap, Tim looks down at his spiral notebook and plays with the edges of its yellow sheets, contemplating which pages he wants to share for open mic night. When he finally does perform, he reads a few poems and then tells us a little story reflecting on his time in college and his recent loss of an old friend.
Tim is one of many performers who shared poetry at September’s open mic. Some others include Rebecca, the wonderful host who is currently working on a novel, and Taylor Ramage, who specializes in black out poetry and recently published an e-book of her work on Amazon.
Charmington’s is a wonderful platform to try your hand at performing because the coffee shop offers an all-inclusive environment for anyone of any gender, religion and even people who like Italian ice more than ice cream. Charmington’s even accepts guest hosts if you think you would be interested in hosting open mic night yourself.
At Charmington’s open mic, you can read anything from a chapter in your latest novella project, a comedy skit or a poem. You can literally read a poem by anyone and still feel the rush of standing before a bunch of strangers (PRO TIP: if you have been having problems with constipation, doing something nerve-wracking, like standing in front of an audience, is a sure way to inspire bowel movement).
If you’re not a poet at all, then you can at least go and eat some good food or get a coffee. They have almond and soy milk, and a really good vegan sandwich but also some turkey stuff if you are into meat. OH. And there are these little s’mores treats there.
Anyway, everyone loves poetry, and if you think you do not love poetry, you are sadly mistaken because every text message you have ever sent to your mom could be combined into a poem and if you say you do not love your mom then you are a liar!
So if you want to take your Tinder date to the next level, invite your date out to open mic night and read one of Beyonce’s songs as a poem (I recommend “Flawless,” but you do you). Even if the date ends really poorly, at least you can update your bio to reflect how artsy and emotionally vulnerable you are now that you have listened to other people read poetry. Plus, the open mic starts at 7 and only goes for about an hour, so if the Tinder date is really bad (trust me, they can be), then you can totally bail at 8.
