Coming Next Week to Stone Soup Poetry

This simple photo is all the rave since I posted it this morning on my Facebook page.  For nearly a decade, I have been struggling to control the open mic time limits at Stone Soup Poetry. 

The idea of a sand timer has been rolling around in my head for a while, ever since I saw Tony Toledo use it a tthe Speak UP: Spoken Word venue in Lynnfield Massachusetts.  After some particularly long nights over the last few months with Stone Soup's increasing audience, I decided to throw down the fifty-odd bucks and got one three-minute timer and one five-minute timer.

The three-minute timer will be used for keeping the open mic manageable when there's a lot of people signed up to read.  The five-minute timer will help to give open mic readers some leeway during quieter nights or the usually less-attended second half of the open mic.

Let's see how this works.