Well, this is some sad news: Awarded "Best Open Mic" by both SF Bay Guardian and SF Weekly, queen open mic night K'vetsh will call it quits after 15 years. It was the longest running queer open mic in San Francisco, quite possibly the world. Hosting a bevy of local and national luminaries (including a particularly, er, festive night we recall featuring Bambi Lake) Tara Jepsen and Kirk Read announced the news today via email. Behold.

We are not sending out a K'vetsh invitation at this time because following a 40 day cayenne maple syrup fast, we have decided to stop producing the show. This November would have marked fifteen years of amazing literary entertainment hosted by impossibly beautiful people: Kirk Read and myself. Not to mention former K'vetsh babysitters Sash Sunday, Sara Seinberg and Lynn Breedlove. We feel that it is just time to let the old girl go and allow the ten billion other open mics and literary nights fill your entertainment holes. If you want more of these nights, then by all means, start one! Right now there are the marvelous RADAR Productions, Porchlight storytelling series, Litquake, Writers with Drinks, Smack Dab open mic, Queer Open Mic and whatever else you dig up on Litseen, etc. We are grateful for all your clapping, slapping, money, enthusiasm, sarcasm, and raw ingenuity. Thanks for listening to other people. Seriously. We have been blessed, awed and horrified by you. We hope there is always a place for the freaks to gather and listen to each other beyond Muni. Please kiss yourselves for us and know that you have made a mark on our lives, and we will spend the rest of our days slathering ourseves with ointment and snake oil. It has been an incredible fun time, and we wouldn't trade it for anything except maybe like a billion kittens.

Anything ending with "a billion kittens" will obviously, clearly, oh-so deeply be missed. If your'e interested in reading your golden nuggets of wisdom at a local open mic night, please check out the aforementioned nights above.