Da Poetry Lounge — Tuesday Open Mic

You drop your name in a bucket, and fate decides whether you read tonight — in front of two hundred strangers who showed up on a Tuesday to hear exactly that. That's the deal at the longest-running spoken-word open mic in Los Angeles. Dante Basco started it in his living room in 1998 with Ron 'Shihan' Van Clief, Devan 'Poetri' Smith, and 'Brutha' Gimmel Hooper, and Da Poetry Lounge has run every Tuesday since, now at Greenway Court Theatre on Fairfax.

This is the room that produced half of LA's spoken-word generation — Saul Williams, Beau Sia, Jamie DeWolf, in their different decades. The third Tuesday of every month is the slam: same room, real stakes. The rest of the time it's open — you sign up, you wait to hear your name, and whether you kill or freeze, the room holds you either way.

Doors at eight, bucket at eight-thirty, mic at nine. Five dollars for open mic, ten for slam, cash only, all ages. Some of tonight's names have already been called. Some of them haven't.