Market Plaza Open Mic happens on the first Wednesday of every month from six until eight in the evening, in the outdoor brick plaza on Park Avenue between First Street and Scenic Highway in downtown Lake Wales. It has been running long enough that the regulars know each other by first name and by instrument, and short enough that newcomers still get a fair slot if they show up on time and sign the list. The whole production runs on three pieces of equipment, one paper list, and a quiet local consensus about what the room is for, which is the only etiquette you really need to internalize before walking in. Load-in begins around five-thirty, the sound stack is up by quarter to six, and a paper sign-up sheet appears on the front of the sound booth within a few minutes after that. You walk up, you write your name and your instrument in the next open slot, and the order in which you play is the order in which you signed. There is no online form. There is no priority list. The act of showing up early is the price of going on early.
When the first slot opens at six, the format is three songs or twelve minutes, whichever ends first, and the house provides a PA stack with two vocal microphones, one direct input for acoustic guitar or keyboard, and one general-purpose instrument microphone. If you are particular about your signal chain, bring your own quarter-inch cable; everything else is provided. The volunteer sound engineer who runs the board has been doing this long enough to dial in a clean mix in about thirty seconds, which is the entire window you get for a sound check, and it is enough. The plaza is outdoor and brick-walled, which means the room is loud and forgiving on vocals and unforgiving on anything you over-drive into the DI, so the universally honored advice from the regulars is to play a hair softer than you would in a club and let the PA do the work it was built to do.
The crowd peaks around seven in the evening, when the Lake Wales Latte Lounge inside the Rhodesbilt Arcade across the street stays open late specifically for first Wednesdays and the side patio fills with people drinking iced coffee and listening through the open shutters. This is the slot to take if you have an original song that you actually believe in, because it is the only slot in the night where the room is genuinely large, genuinely attentive, and large enough that an opinion can ripple across it. By a quarter to eight, the energy begins to settle, the last two or three players take the longest slots of the night, and the production is wrapped by eight on the dot, because the plaza sits within earshot of a residential block and the entire monthly arrangement depends on the residents continuing to like the open mic. After the wrap, most of the band crowd migrates two blocks south to the Thirsty Dragon, which becomes the unofficial after-room for anyone who wants to talk about playing rather than play.
What the room actually wants, more than anything else technical, is for performers to stay through the end. Originals are received better than covers, but covers are perfectly fine and always have been; quiet is received better than loud, on a PA that does not need to be pushed; short spoken introductions between songs are welcome, especially if they explain where the song came from; and the single most respected behavior in the entire monthly cycle is the act of staying in your seat for the players who come on after you have finished your slot. That is the whole etiquette. Bring business cards if you are looking to form or join a band, because the small corkboard next to the sound booth is where the 'drummer wanted' and 'looking for a bass player' notes actually get read, and the full Lake Wales and Winter Haven performer contact list on the Open Mic page of this site is the longer reference if you want to make introductions before the next first Wednesday rolls around.