Across the street from Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, there was a small guitar shop called Rambling Conrads. It specialized in acoustic guitars and smelled like wood, sweat, and dreams that hadn’t been crushed yet.
On weekend nights, they’d drag out folding chairs and host open mic nights. The shop was tiny—guitars hanging on every wall, barely any floor space, and a small side room in the back with a drink machine and the bathrooms. That back room was where you prepared to go onstage. You tuned your guitar, tried not to throw up, and questioned every decision you’d ever made.
It wasn’t a dressing room. Hell, I was already dressed.
Bob, the owner, ran the whole thing. He had a sign-up sheet. First to sign up, first to play. No hiding. No easing into it. No “maybe later.”
That’s where I was about to have my very first stage experience.
Driving to Rambling Conrads that night, I almost turned around at every intersection. Every red light felt like an opportunity to escape. I tried singing in the car to warm up my voice. I was never a gifted singer, but if you’re a songwriter, singing is part of the deal whether you like it or not.
At that point in my life, I had a deep fondness for Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. What I loved about him was that he wasn’t a great singer either—but the way he turned a phrase pulled you right into the song. It felt real. When he sang, you were suddenly there with him. Freight trains, wide open land, and a time much harder than anything I’d ever lived through.
I decided I would pattern myself after him. The only problem was I hadn’t mastered his phrasing, so what came out of me sounded more like garbled hoots and groans.
I sat in the back room waiting for my name to be called. My palms were sweating, my mouth was bone-dry, and I was pretty sure I might pass out. I listened to the other performers, and some of them were really good.
This did not help.
When Bob finally called my name, every instinct in my body told me to run. Instead, I walked toward the stage—which, for the record, was just a stool in the corner of the room.
I sat down and introduced myself, then immediately realized I had forgotten to use the restroom.
So I stood up, walked into the back room, used the bathroom, came back out, put money into the drink machine, and got a soda. You could hear the can clunk its way down through the machine. People laughed. I’m pretty sure they heard the toilet flush too.
I returned to the stage, sat on the stool, leaned back—and promptly fell off.
At this point, I wanted the earth to open up and swallow me whole.
Somehow, the audience thought this was intentional. Like it was part of the act. I played my two songs, barely remembering how they went, and slinked off the stage.
I packed up my guitar, got to my car, and sat there cycling through a full range of emotions—from I should never show my face in public again to I kind of want to do that again.
By the time I got home, I knew the answer.
I wanted to go back. I wanted to learn how to work a crowd. I wanted to figure out how to entertain people. And eventually, I wanted to learn how to stay on the stool.
It’s hard to explain why someone who’s shy and hates speaking in front of people would choose this as a way of life. But I did.
And once you step onto a stage—even terrified—you don’t really forget how it feels.
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