Jaen Black's gifts of wit and laughter light up the Lower

Jaen Black, Orcas writer and entertainer, hosts Tuesday nights at the Lower

Jaen Black, eight-year Orcas Island resident, has been entertaining guests at the Lower Tavern on Tuesday nights since January. More correctly stated, she has been enticing patrons to entertain each other.

Black calls herself the “Instigator” of the Tuesday night shows at the Lower – “I’m doing a good job of not having a real ego-based, edgy energy, you know the ‘Gunslinger with a Guitar’ model.”

Instead she takes pride in the number of people who participate in the open mic events. “They’re unique in that people are tending to collaborate. Rarely do people get up to perform solo.”

Black says that the Lower Tavern has a great sound system and the management “does a great job of turning us loose, so  it’s conducive to sit and observe, to have a meal or a couple of beers.

“I feel like I have a disarming nature with strangers, and people like to laugh and not be so serious. I do my rounds and ask people, ‘Do y’all play or sing?'” says Black.

She often brings her drumsets to the Lower and there a couple of “house guitars” for people to pick up.

“People feel welcome the first time they come, so they come back. And there’s a number of people who had music in the forefront of their lives many years ago; they will inevitably pick up the guitar again, or start singing.”

The crowd is totally receptive and performers are “tickled that people want to hear them,” Black says.

She describes one night that the Klezmatics, the Grammy Award-winning, world-renowned Klezmer band just rolled in to the Lower. “I didn’t know them from Adam’s housecat; but every one of them got up with us.” It wasn’t until Black asked them what they were doing on Orcas that she learned the nationally-touring group had a date at the Orcas Center the next night.

She describes one Lower Tuesday night regular as “The Paulinator” – a shy unassuming kind of fellow, but good god, week by week that boy has just blossomed. It’s a great little groove he’s got going there.”

Another musician, Ken Salt, is a Lower regular and Black looks forward to “doing something with him musically some day.”

Black came to Orcas Island in 2002, “looking to get out of the urban chaos and hot weather and live around the water.” She’d spent 30 years in Atlanta, Georgia, and had owned her own gym where she was a weight-lifting coaching.

“I’m a great weight-lifting coach – for people that want to get strong in any dimension. I accept people for where they are, who come to learn from me, not look at me like Miss Hooty-Hoo.”

On Orcas, she’s had a mobile stone-etching “factory” and sold her “stone sayings” at island markets and shows. She’s also a writer, and published her novel, “Bastante” in 2008. Her reading of that book at the Lower last summer launched her Tuesday night shows, which began in January.

Black also performed in the circus troupe at the recent “Cabaret in the Air” at the Orcas Center OffCenter Stage. “I’m like the rodeo clown – I have no pride about making a fool of myself,” she says.

With that attitude, her humor always entails a risk she’s willing to take. Once she tried a stand-up routine at an open mike in a large city. “They were the most hostile group of humans I’ve ever encountered … professional comedic listeners. I thought I was funny, but nobody laughed – their stares went through my heart.”

Black has been writing and rehearsing a one-woman show for  “a lifetime.”  She’ll entertain Orcas Islanders with a glimpse of it as part of Monologue Night at the Orcas Center on June 12 at 7:30 p.m. (Tickets on sale at www.orcascenter.org and 376-2281.)

Black is looking forward to the performance, “It’s fun to make laugh; it’s a gift when people melt – especially adults. I’m perpetually playful.”