Lynn Samuels

“Where’s Bob Dylan?”
No answer.
“Who wrote Bob Dylan?”
Still no answer.
“Bob Dylan is NOT getting a number!”
The voice could cut through the crowded bar like a Ginsu knife.
Lynn Samuels ran the Folk City open mic night with an iron fist. She took no crap, was nasty to the performers, and had no patience for people who missed their number, went overtime, or asked dumb questions. Oh, and she hated people who wrote obviously phony names on the index cards. Especially if it was the name of a particularly well-known folk icon who started out in the same establishment twenty-five years earlier. I always wondered what she would do if Mr. Zimmerman actually showed up.
It worked like this: sign up was from 7 to 7:45ish. You wrote your name on an index card, your phone umber as well, although the likelihood of actually getting called for a gig was next to nil. Lynn would then shuffle a deck of cards, draw one and give you a number. It had nothing to do with how early you got there. You could be the first one at sign-up and end up going on at one in the morning, or you could just straggle in under the wire and be on your way home or off to Speakeasy around the corner by 8:30. Playing both places in one night was a rare treat.
Back to Lynn. She would start calling numbers at 8:00. You had ten minutes or two songs. At eight minutes she would flash the lights on you. If you were still playing at ten minutes, she killed the mic and the lights. Any complaints were met with a very biting “Tough luck!”
I once brought a friend along on a Monday night, and after listening to her for about five minutes he commented, “this one’s a real sweetheart, isn’t she.” And the truth is, as far as I was concerned, she was. Really.
For one thing, she always pronounced my name correctly. Vinny Marquardt does not roll off the tongue easily. And even though I am not of Italian descent, people always pronounce “Vinny” with something resembling a Brooklyn accent, usually throwing in “Yo” just before the name. Lynn, although she had that whiny Queens kind of thing in her voice, always pronounce it clearly and respectfully. Or as respectfully as she was capable of doing. Thank you, Lynn. And I think she like my choice of music. I think it impressed her that in all this “folk music” (which she claimed to hate), I made an impact with a solo acoustic version of “Solsbury Hill”. When I announced “Here’s a song by Peter Gabriel,” I overheard her saying something to the effect of “wait, nobody does stuff like that here!” Thank you again Lynn.
My attempt at being a singer/songwriter (yes, I did original material as well) never went anywhere. About two years after my last open mic I went back as part of a trio. We had more success, although as you can see it too eventually went nowhere. But the thing that broke my heart was when I went back with a group, Lynn was gone. Not dead gone, just not at Folk City gone. She ended up as the only liberal voice on WABC radio after they went all talk. She was just as nasty, funny and biting as in those Folk City days. She would even refer to her past career from time to time.
But she never mentioned my name.
I didn’t really expect her to.
She was really gone on December 24, 2011.
Rest in peace, Lynn. You made a difference.