Pull A Card, Play A Song: A Fool On A Highway To Yeah Goes To An Open Mic …

Ah, I am so glad that August has extended itself into the beginning workday of this week.

It feels a bit like discovering that you didn’t miss the deadline, and you can still submit the “whatever” that mattered on time (homework, taxes, application, etc.).

There is still hope. The summer is still here a little bit longer.

But change is in the air.

Before we know it, for those in the Northern Hemisphere, the temperatures will cool at night.

The leaves will start to change.

The march toward the never-ending holiday season will be in full swing.

Then winter. The end.

Unless you are on a quest in the coming year. And I suggest we all find and go on one.

Maybe your quest is about achieving total financial freedom from a paycheck.

Maybe it is about developing the freedom to more fully live your truth.

Maybe it is about radically designing a life you love.

There are lots of good options.

Today, I want to share the results of an experiment I decided to conduct on Saturday. I decided to do it at the very last minute.

When I attended the Northwest Tarot Symposium, a speaker there by the name of Madame Pamita brought up Woody Guthrie.

She is an interesting lady.

Her presentation was about her life’s journey and how she came to find and utilize tarot in her life and eventually in her career.

There were some interesting synchronicities in her story and my own.

First, she bought her first deck on a trip with her family back east.

It was a tourist, traveling-size Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) tarot deck. she bought it at some kind of spells and magic shop in Salem, Massachusetts.

She played with it for a few years, not really knowing what it meant or what to do with it, but it captured her imagination and interest.

Okay, cool coincidence.

When I was an exchange student in massachussets, with about 20+ other students from across the country, we would take weekend trips to visit the sights and sounds.

one of our weekend trips was to visit the North Shore of the Boston Metro area.

Obviously, one of the significant tourist-trap stops is the Salem Witch Museum. We went, and it was fun and interesting.

Guess what souvenir I bought at the gift shop that day?

Yep, same small-sized RWS deck.

I remember some of us playing with it that night and maybe a couple more times during the next week. Like Pamita, we had no idea what it was or how to use it.

After that, I quickly forgot about it. I have no idea where it went.

Second, she then told us how she got into punk rock, and particularly the post-punk music scene in Los Angeles in the 1980s.

Later, she and some of her friends formed an all-girl group, which was still unusual back then. I think she said they called themselves The Neptunes. Cool name.

Then, some of them went on to form an early “sounds like” tribute band they called “Chick Trick” (after Cheap Trick).

Finally, she decided it was time to “grow up” and leave her rock and roll life behind.

I hate it when people say that, but that’s a topic for another article…

Anyway, she and some friends got into old-school folk music from the 1930s and 1940s. She brought up the name “Alan Lomax,” and that surprised me.

That was the second interesting synchronicity.

You see, I had just learned about this Lomax guy while reading the Woody Guthrie biography I have mentioned in previous articles.

In fact, her final slide for the presentation was a cartoon that Woody had drawn with a quote by him (see Thumbnail).

Back to her life’s journey…

They decided to start an “old-time Medicine Show.” It was a musical group and production.

I am not sure exactly what a Medicine Show is, but I think it was a gypsy-like group of people that brought a show from town to town.

They probably sold snake oil. They probably did acrobatic, juggling, or other tricks. It makes me think of Vaudeville meets the Old West.

She said they had a repertoire of about 35-40 songs. Each song was assigned a tarot card. She would ask an audience member to pick a card, and that would be the next song they played.

Madame Pamita gave us an example.

Someone pulled a card (something about a heartbreaker, femme fatale, but I don’t recall the exact card), and then she sang a song while playing her ukulele, getting us to join in on the chorus.

Very fun. Very artistic. Very Bowie and The Spiders from Mars, I was thinking.

Back to my Saturday show…

I had rehearsed 6 songs that were all ready for public performance.

Four of them I had not played before, ever, for a live audience.

I was not sure which ones I wanted to play or in what order.

Oh, why not test Madame Pamita’s card-show act?

So, I got out my tarot deck, shuffled the cards, and pulled 6 at random.

each one corresponded to one of the six songs. I had the lyric sheets for the songs stacked in order, 1-6, so the first card went to the first song in the stack, etc.

then, without enough time to talk myself out of it, hit the door to drive to the open mic.

On the way, I used ChatGPT to tell me the meaning of each card and try to help me come up with a brief description I could use to describe it to the audience.

To recap, each card represented a song.

An audience member pulls the card of the song to play next.

and that is also their own “fortune” for the day.

I got up on stage, presented this idea to the audience, and got a bunch of “what the heck is he doing?” kind of energy back.

However, a brave woman came up and pulled a card.

Bless her.

Knight of Wands. The song was Finally Found. A nice up-tempo, crowd-pleaser type of song.

Great so far.

“Anyone else? And to save time, just point at the card you want?”

A brave man, one of my closer companions at these open mics, says, “You’re scaring me, man. But sure, yeah, okay, that one.”

Page of Cups. The song was Given A Second Chance.

Anyone else?

A bass player in the audience, who had accompanied me a year or two ago on his congas, pointed at the next card.

The Star. The song was Oregon Coast.

All right.

I looked at the host.

It was a thin crowd of performers that day, so I asked if I could play one more song, and if he wanted to pull a card.

Sure, and he pointed at the next card.

The Fool. The song was Steal Another Tomorrow.

After I was done, we had some fun discussions about what the cards might mean.

Folks who picked cards, I saw, were looking them up on their phones to see what they might mean for them.

The lady who picked the first card said that was the very first time she had ever done something like that, going up as a volunteer from the audience.

Nice! Very appropriate for her to have pulled the Knight of Wands.

Everybody did their set, and the host asked if any of us wanted to go again and play a couple more songs.

Sure!

Then I thought about the two songs I had left. I decided to Only go with one of the two I Hah randomly assigned a card.

The other song with a card assigned I had played before, and I knew it was a crowd favorite, but it didn’t fit. It’s more of a middle-of-a-set song.

And heck, why not test two Songs I haven’t played for an audience before?

I started with the song and card that was one of the two that had not been picked.

Three of Cups. The song was Amarillo Señora.

And then I played a song I wasn’t sure I even wanted to keep in the repertoire.

But having never played it for an audience, why not give it a shot?

The song was Be What You Are Going To Be.

The audience loved it. They were grooving with it.

Nice.

So, how did the experiment go?

A bit of a mess?

Yes.

Do I care?

No.

Highway to Yeah, baby!

I am glad I did it. It made for an interesting day.

But I definitely want to work on my act a bit more if I do this again!

Very Fool energy, don’t you think?

Tomorrow, or sometime this next week, I will come back with the second half of this story.

What did the audience-chosen spread indicate for my own plans in the coming year?

Interestingly, it said a lot.

Surprised?

Not really.