All this "give 'em all an opportunity" talk is nice sounding but, if you want to hold an audience, you have to have some kind of quality control. You do purport to be presenting an entertaining evening, for which you are charging a real price of admission. You must decide where your responsibility lies. If your open mike is a training session for undeveloped acts, for whom you provide an audience, then charge the performers and let the audience in free. This is not sophistry. This is exactly what major showcases do, they charge the performers for a place on their stage and the performers are happy to pay. The presenters (club owners, program chairs, recording companies, etc.) are invited guests. It is, after all, their favor that the artists are trying to win. I have some experience in this area. For thirty years, I ran the Festival Campfire at the Philadelphia Folk Fest. The performers ranged in expertise from novice to touring professional (occasionally a singer came over to the campfire after their set on the main stage. Michael Cooney was a frequent drop-in and Susan Werner and Tom Paxton stopped by to spice things up) I was careful to prescreen my singers as I had been burned too often by sincere but tedious tyros who sang on and on and on until My audience was torn between lynching and wholesale desertion. Eventually, we solved our problem by turning the evening into a contest with an afternoon of preliminary heats to cull the finalists down to the very best singers. This way, everyone had their chance to perform but my audience heard only quality product. I must admit that I didn't make Paxton audition. I would have but he has no sense of humor.

Mike Miller