Mike Boyd, SpeakeasyDC’s Board Chair

How did you get involved in SEDC and how has your association with SpeakeasyDC impacted your business and/or your life?

At the invitation of friends, I attended a SpeakeasyDC Open Mic in early 2007 and became an instant fan. I’d just moved back to DC after spending seven years in Knoxville, TN, and I’d never seen anything like it. I was impressed by the stories and the performances, but it was the audience that blew me away the most. There just seemed to be so much love, warmth and empathy for every storyteller. I knew that I wanted to get up on that stage someday, and I immediately signed up for a Storytelling 101 Boot Camp. Four months later, I told my first story at an Open Mic, and since then, I’ve performed with SpeakeasyDC three more times. Growing up in the South, some of my favorite memories are of holiday dinners, listening to my grandmother, my mother and my aunts tell stories about their childhoods. When I saw that first SpeakeasyDC show and took the class, it reconnected me to those times, and it reawakened my creative self that had mostly laid dormant while I worked in the corporate world for 20+ years.

What is your biggest goal for your business/organization in the next year? How about personal goal?

As Chair of SpeakeasyDC’s board, I want to continue the growth of the organization and our footprint across the city, the mid-Atlantic region and the country. Over the next two to three years, I’d like to see us be able to add administrative staff and have a permanent home for our office, our classes and our rehearsals. And I’d like to see us increase our diversity, not only among our performers and our audience, but in the communities that we reach. SpeakeasyDC’s mission is to give voice to the authentic experience of ordinary people, build community and promote understanding. It is absolutely essential that we achieve a greater diversity of voices if we are to truly promote cross-cultural connections and understanding.

Personally speaking, I want to continue growing in the variety of creative pursuits that I’ve engaged in since leaving my corporate job and becoming a freelance consultant. In addition to storytelling, I’ve taken singing lessons, a cooking class, a play writing class and a voice-over training program. A lot of my consulting work has been in script writing for television ads, but I’d like to do more fiction writing on my own. Or work on my memoirs!

If you could have any job in the world, other than your own, what would it be?

Game show/competition show host. As a kid, I wanted Bob Barker’s job. I thought it was the coolest thing ever that he got to host both “The Price is Right” and “The Miss USA Pageant.”

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever gotten? 

You have to let yourself feel what you feel when you feel it.

If you had a band, what would you name it?

Matches and Knives. (It’s from an old Indigo Girls song called “Blood and Fire” that I listened to over and over in the late 80s – it was a dark time in my life.)

##

One of Mike’s jobs as Board Chair is to head our individual giving campaigns, and we just kicked off our Spring Campaign on May 14 – look for his letter in your mailboxes this week! Or, if you don’t want to wait, you can just go ahead and make your donation now by clicking here!