Day: November 11, 2026

When it comes to my most significant artistic endeavors, I haven't always operated alone. About a decade and a half ago, I was part of a collaborative project at Bill's Records on South Lamar (now Botham Jean Blvd.) with my longtime friend and occasional co-conspirator Alex Pogosov. The project was a reincarnation of an earlier open mic which ran from 2002-2006 at Bill's old location off Spring Valley in far north Dallas. The Lost Art Open Mic, as this later enterprise came to be known, began in May 2010 and ran until early June 2011, and has been chronicled on this site since some of its earliest days. Looking back at all the open mic nights we conducted, there are some that stand out as great successes, and others that I don't recall quite so fondly. Generally those not so fond remembrances are related to instances of low attendance or lackluster performances (or, in two cases, because I felt our event was hijacked). But there's one night in particular that I have largely avoided facing for a long time, one I've always been loath to revisit and hesitant to talk much about. And it isn't because no one showed up or because we had a uniquely terrible performer appear who tortured our ears with a blistering sonic assault. It's a night that became stigmatized in my memory due to the series of events that followed it and the impact they had on one of the primary contributors to our scene. And I'm finally going to talk about it here.

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