T.V. Mike stands at the door of the Orbit Room.
He’s posted up with a card reader, his attention pulled in every direction.
One minute, he walks up the stairs. The next, he’s back down, scurrying through the room.
He wears a backward baseball cap, tie-dye shirt, rolled-sleeve button-down, greying-brown beard and brown hair falling down the sides.
He crosses to the back of the room, talking with a patron before disappearing behind the bar and into the kitchen.
Moments later, he creeps out from behind the bar and speaks to the sound guy.
With a smile and the crack of a beer can, he rejoins the customers.
Seamlessly, quietly, he keeps the place running.
A group of patrons huddle around the bar during the finals days of the venue (Photo by Kade Young).
Michael Klinge said the idea for the Orbit Room came to him in the back of a tour van in the mid 2000s. He started dreaming of opening a venue in Bloomington.
Klinge moved to Bloomington in 1997 and started hosting arts events two years later. After about a decade, he and his wife Katie Novotny moved to Oakland, California.
During their time in Oakland, he was playing a lot of music and booking his own band, T.V. Mike and the Scarecrows. He was involved in DIY spaces and what he called the “warehouse scene.”
“There’s a huge warehouse scene that when we first moved there, that was really exciting to see, like how you can put things together, like full production, a nice sound system and seeing 300 people cram into a warehouse that also looks like a pirate ship,” he said.
As local residents often do, the couple circled back to Bloomington in 2017 – what we like to call a “Bloomerang.” He and his wife heard of the space available – the same space where Mike had an office and recording studio in the early 2000s.
“We found the space, and then maybe somewhat being naïve, we jumped right in, and then discovered we found a very hard space, like an almost unusable space that needed to be created to be usable. And we went through a lot to do it.”
He hasn’t done a tour with his band, the Scarecrows, since the venue opened. It’s been “all in” with the Orbit.
A list of draft beers and a hot dog special hangs on the wall in the Orbit Room (Photo by Kade Young).
It’s been nearly a decade since T.V. Mike’s dream came true, but now he says it’s time to hang up his hat.
“If it’s not really supporting itself after that long, then why is it not? Those kinds of things come to your mind, and it seemed like a good time to focus on transitioning out of this project, this long thing that we had been pouring all of ourselves into for years.”
As the Orbit Room’s run comes to an end, T.V. Mike says his mission is for bargoers to have the best summer in Bloomington. Crowds have packed the Orbit’s recent shows.
“I mean, the outpouring of support and people showing up right now – we are literally busier than we’ve ever been in our entire existence. People are walking in that have never ever been there, that have lived in Bloomington this entire time. So it is a little bittersweet with that, but it’s also like we’re here to show you what is possible with a lot of hard work and a great community supporting you.”
However, he says the Orbit Room has run its course. He doesn’t see the financial situation improving, and he’s running out of steam to maintain the bar.
“Orbit Room is closing because it just is time to wrap it up. We can’t keep pushing the rock up the same hill. I think it makes sense to just celebrate what we have left and use this love and community that we have gathered into something new.”
Orbit Room’s gourmet hot dog menu (Photo by Kade Young).
Orbit Room’s closing marks another local staple in town that has shuttered its doors. Around the time Klinge announced the venue’s closure, Fat Dan’s decided it would also be shutting down. Soon after, Trojan Horse revealed plans to move to Ellettsville after 48 years in Bloomington.
They’re not alone. Longtime Kirkwood staples Irish Lion and Cafe Pizzeria closed in recent years along with beloved places like Darn Good Soup, Bedrak Cafe, Juanitas Restaurant and the Laughing Planet Cafe.
While each business has a unique story, restaurant owners often cite the same struggles — steep rent increases, inflation and rising labor costs have made it difficult to stay open.
At a place like Orbit Room, located on the downtown square, growing a profitable business is especially challenging. Orbit is unique – it’s not just a restaurant and bar. It’s a live music venue, an arcade and a third space for community members.
“I don’t think they’ll realize how razor thin margins are, in general, for a restaurant. You add being an art event space that’s all ages on a square in a basement. Little things matter,” said Klinge. “We haven’t even the restaurant industry haven’t even seen the real changes of what gas prices just going up $2 in the period of a month. That’ll all just get trickled out like all kinds of other things.”
He pointed to other closures of creative spaces in town like Player’s Pub and Rhino’s All Ages Club.
“I don’t know if Bloomington can support an all ages venue that needs to be in the normal capitalist system. That’s my only real answer.”
Sarah Owen, community engagement coordinator for Exodus Refugee Immigration, gives a presentation between live music sets (Photo by Kade Young).
The lights are low. Multi-colored fiesta lights wrap around the room while seven thumb-tack-shaped lights cast alternating glows of mustard yellow and faint purple.
House music hums through the speakers as people trickle down the stairs. Before long, about 50 people fill the room, nearing capacity.
“What’s up, everyone?” says Sarah Owen, the community engagement director of Exodus Refugee Immigration.
A portion of the night’s ticket sales goes to Exodus, a testament to the ethos of the Orbit Room. Over the years, it’s been a gathering place for live music, film screenings, nonprofit events, pinball games, hot dog eating contests and everything in between.
As Owen presents T.V. Mike keeps moving, making sure patrons are comfortable. He grabs a can of beer, cracks it, hustles across the room, out the door and up the stairs to hand it to a customer waiting outside.
One of the last hot dog specials Orbit Room ran, the “Busty Bear” in collaboration with Mother Bear’s Pizza (courtesy photo).
Upstairs on the patio, local resident Wendy Gingerich sits with her niece, enjoying a specialty hot dog called the “Busty Bear” – which contains Mother Bear’s Pizza sauce, garlic flat-top cheese curds, grilled peppers and onions.
Gingerich, Mother Bear’s general manager, calls the bar a town staple. If she happens to walk around downtown, she knows where she wants to go.
Gingerich says her 24-year-old niece regularly drives 40 minutes to Indianapolis for “glizzies,” a slang term for hot dogs.
Gingerich told her there was no need to leave Bloomington. She took her to the Orbit Room for one of its local, gourmet glizzies instead.
After trying it, she says her niece was convinced.
Telling the story, Gingerich smiled. She says Orbit showcases the welcoming atmosphere of Bloomington.
“I had a date here, in which being gay… in this space, it was just so normalized, and it made me feel at home and safe, and it’s such a vibe of being all inclusive and accepting and supportive.”
She says she understands times are tough right now with local businesses. Nonetheless, she holds fond memories of the venue.
“There’s just something relaxing about it,” said Gingerich. “It’s like home – a second space.”
Gingerich said while the world outside might seem in shambles, she feels safe at the Orbit.
“It’s just that B-Town vibe,” she said. “With everything going on in the world right now, it means a lot to me that I can still come here and capture that feeling.”
In her mind, the Orbit Room is a secret place, a hidden-gem, if you will.
“I don’t know how many times I walked past this,” she said. “When you find the Orbit Room, you know you have made it.”
With the Orbit Room shutting its doors, Gingerich described what she thinks Bloomington will lose.
“As far as the space, it will be a loss,” she said. “Where do you go to get that?”
In the future, she says she can only hope the location will provide a safe community-centered, second space that fosters new friendships. If the seed is planted, she says magic can happen.
Bargoers exit the hallway that leads into the main room at the Orbit (Photo by Jar Turner).
Small pockets of three to four people fill every corner of the room — a mix of longtime Bloomington residents, IU students and families with children.
It’s a tight space with a small bar, limited seating and a small “stage” – if you can even call it that. It’s essentially an opening in the front of the room with bandmates huddled closely together.
A thick bass line cuts through crowd chatter. The heavy machinery of electric guitar falls in. Badkill, a two-piece band from Athens, Georgia, is off to the races.
“Everybody give it up for Exodus Refugee,” says the lead singer.
They’re normally a three-piece band, but the lead singer maintains their drummer is currently “traveling the world.”
At the edge of the room, a projector loops images of tiny green aliens, their hands waving and heads bobbing.
Low lights hang at the bar at the Orbit Room (courtesy photo).
Shiny blue streamers dangle from the ceiling. Chili-pepper lights glow overhead. The room smells of beer and hot dogs.
When local folk noise rocker Neko Anne Hedonia and his three-piece band take the stage, the room falls silent.
After the show, Hedonia stands outside on College Avenue, talking to a group of friends. He towers over the sidewalk, his long curly-brown hair falling around his face, catching in his scraggly facial hair and horseshoe mustache.
Hedonia doesn’t call his music “folk noise rock,” he prefers “postmodern folk emo.” He says his relationship with the Orbit Room is complicated.
“It’s kind of a microcosm of small-town social trauma and redemption,” he said. “I like underground things.”
For Hedonia, part of the appeal comes from the familiarity of seeing people he knows at the bar, which he frames as a “ground loom.”
As for the future of the location, he hopes to see a continuation of the vibrant Bloomington arts scene. But he worries the city might face a bigger issue – preserving art despite rising costs.
“There’s a deep contradiction in the soul of this town which holds that we can have a vibrant arts scene,” said Hedonia. “And also continue to have our property values go up indefinitely.”
He points to new ventures keeping the spirit of the Orbit Room intact, including Cicada Cinema.
“I think that there is a good bit of the soul of the Orbit Room remaining in projects like the Cicada Cinema building, which is pretty exciting,” he said. “That’s really the thing that’s gonna make anything worth doing survive – a continuous community organism that does not exist at any one person’s brick and mortar establishment.”
Orbit Room patrons stand in a packed room watching Busman’s Holiday perform on the last day of the Orbit Room (Photo by Jar Turner).
The Orbit Room’s closing leaves behind a question facing many cities. How do you preserve a community space when those spaces struggle to survive financially?
For T.V. Mike, the answer is still being written.
He says he’ll continue creating events in Bloomington and the surrounding area, but he doesn’t know what the next permanent home for that work will look like.
“I’m gonna go on vacation with my family, and I’m gonna play a lot of Grateful Dead on my guitar with my Grateful Dead buddies, and just kind of do the things I haven’t been able to for at least a couple months, and start fielding ideas, because I don’t know what door I want next.”
Whatever comes next, he hopes it carries the same energy that built the Orbit Room: a place where art, music and a sense of belonging can exist under one roof.
For now, it’s the end of an orbit. But like all things that move in cycles, something new is bound to come back around.
