Mondays are not a day to dread at The Wandering Stool — they are a day to howl at the moon with your friends next to a campfire.
Around 6 p.m. on Monday evenings, attendees new and old gather in a backyard or park, with the location sent out on a private Instagram before the event. During the cold weather months, a bonfire blazes for warmth. Once everyone is settled in, Calvin Burke, founder of the open mic, said he generally kicks off the night with a fun call and response — lip buzzing that sounds like underwater bubble blowing.
Then, the group will collectively “howl like a pack of wolves.” After this, the fun night of music, stand-up comedy and poetry can begin.
“We co-create a roving open mic that wanders to a new place each Monday, from 6-ish to midnight-ish,” Burke said. “And we’re a copacetic collective of charismatic cats who create craziness.”
The open mic began last fall, he said, when there wasn’t much of a live music scene due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Burke said this is a part of the inspiration for creating the open mic. However, the idea for The Wandering Stool didn’t just come from the pandemic.
“Part of the inspiration for The Wandering Stool comes from the Campbell Club open mic,” Burke said. “You could see, and you could feel, a real sense of community, especially between the people who came somewhat consistently.”
The Campbell Club was once a popular Eugene music venue that hosted an open mic every Tuesday. Unfortunately, internal conflicts led the venue to close its doors several years ago.
But the idea of creating his own open mic, with a community similar to that, was “bouncing around [his] head for a long time,” until Burke decided on a whim to host the first one last October in his backyard.
“The scene was totally dead, nothing was happening,” Larry Farrington, a friend of Burke’s who assists in running the open mic, said referring to the music scene in Eugene last fall. “We needed a place to make art and interact.
The open mic was named for the physical “wandering stool” — a purple and blue stool with “The Wandering Stool” written around a white tree design that the performers use to sit on. It was painted by another former collaborator in The Wandering Stool named Tulaasi Jerome and has traveled to the various backyards each week.
Now, The Wandering Stool has become a regular occurance. It has even traveled to festivals in a Washington forest and the Black Rock Desert in Nevada in a “magic hippie bus,” as Burke said.
When creating The Wandering Stool, Burke and the other dedicated members took COVID precautions into account. The Wandering Stool always takes place outside, and “it’s a space where people can choose the degree to which they feel comfortable interacting with others,” Burke said. “We don’t ever force or push people to sit or stand closer together than they actually would want to.”
As a whole, The Wandering Stool has grown into a “very fluid, integrated community,” Aerielle Gibson, a regular attendee and musician who goes by the stage name aerielele, said.
“It’s a community, but it’s a loose community,” Gibson said, acknowledging that different locations lead to different crowds each week, some even returning for subsequent open mics. “Not everyone is for sure going to show up to The Wandering Stool [each week], but everyone that is part of the community cares.”
Gibson started going to The Wandering Stool this past April and credits it for giving them an audience and a recognizable name in the local music scene. They also love the welcoming and positive environment at the open mic, especially when they were dealing with a very difficult time in life this past spring.
“Going to that open mic became a safe space, something that you just look forward to,” Gibson said. “You always knew it was going to be a good experience because there’s music and there’s friends and everybody’s positive.”
Burke also said it is “a space where people feel safe to express themselves and be vulnerable,” noting he has felt comfortable being vulnerable himself.
“People come up, and they know that they are not at all obliged to share, but they are absolutely welcome and encouraged to,” Burke said, going on to say people can see the way others are “seen, heard and accepted” and know they will be too. “I think there’s something really powerful in that.”
Both Burke and Gibson agree: Having a safe outlet and community like the one at The Wandering Stool is important during the COVID-19 pandemic, an era of constant uncertainty.
“We’re at a time where there’s a lot of division, and — aside from anyone’s belief — I think it’s really important that as human beings we should be able to come together over music and love each other and have that community,” Gibson said. “And make it a comfortable and safe place for everyone to be.”
