Folks, let me begin with a confession. I am in the middle of an extended mid-life crisis. I say this because I’ve noticed that the older I get the more I seem to scare the living daylights out of myself. For example, when I turned 30 I went tandem skydiving 'coz nothing says you’re getting old and stupid quite like jumping out of a perfectly good airplane at 10,000 feet with a swarthy guy wearing the actual parachute strapped to your back. I took up scuba diving again after a long absence from the water at 35; and by the time I turn 40 I hope to fulfill my life-long fantasy to give myself a massive coronary by cage diving to see a great white shark.

Getting up close and personal with JAWS though seems a lot less terrifying to me than standing in front of a crowd to read my own work. It’s not like I’ve never made a complete ass of myself in public. I grew up being the class clown. I did some theatre in college and I’ve even been known to occasionally dress in fishnets and a gold top hat for midnight screenings of the Rocky Horror Picture Show at the Rialto Theatre in Montreal (ah those were the days!) But that was a million years ago and I haven’t donned my sequined bustier in quite sometime.

Sharing your own limited thoughts in public however is truly horrifying and ultimately vulnerable. I thought I was brave when I started writing again and posted the odd story or poem online but I’ve since discovered that it’s quite easy to hide anonymously behind a keyboard when you write under a pseudonym like Nat le Gros Monstre. A mountain of courage I am not.

So why in the name of Mark Twain’s smelly cigars would I willingly go to an open mike for writers? Mid-life crisis aside, I’m still trying to figure that out. Perhaps deep down I needed to justify the amount of time I spend at a keyboard; or maybe it’s the little bit of “Columbia” still left in me that’s yearning to get the gold top hat out of the closet. Whatever the urge, it was with enormous trepidation that I walked into the 316 Lounge in Hamilton, Ontario on a recent Thursday night.

Open Mike Write was hosted by Hamilton native son, Jaimz Woolvett. As an actor, Jaimz has already accumulated an impressive list of accomplishments. He has appeared in episodes of seemingly everything from E.N.G., La Femme Nikita to Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. He has played such diverse roles as Dominic Grace in 1997’s Sanctuary, Deputy Earl in Rosewood and Nathan in 2004’s The Lazarus Child.