“I’ve been thinking about putting a suggestion box up by the tip jar at the door. Or something like don’t pay cover, just drop in a name,” Perkins says during a recent interview at the Dash-In.

“Whatever. Just help us out. I’ve got a lot of people telling me that I should come up with a stage name. Maybe if this were a bigger city, although I doubt it. I feel like that’s ostentatious. Just for me, though. I don’t call judgment for other people who choose to do that, that’s cool.

“When I’m up there, doing whatever it is we’re doing, I don’t hold anything back. And I don’t want some name that’s not me as sort of a barrier between that. That’s kind of a weird way of saying it.”

Whatever it is Perkins does, she sure raised the roof off a packed house at Columbia Street West during the whatzup Best of 2000 Readers Poll Awards ceremony February 15. Although Best New Artist runnerup Perkins performed that night with Tim Manges on guitar, her complete acoustic act features Misfit Toys bassist Manges and guitarist Gary Johnson on acoustic guitars and percussionist Charley Shirmeyer. And true to the mellow Misfit Toys way, the Perkins project is in no hurry to — in the immortal words of British pop duo Wham! — “Make It Big.”

“Mellow. That’s nice. That’s a good way of saying unambitious,” Perkins says. “It’s relaxed. We’re really loose with it. We’re really casual. We all just like to get together and jam, so I don’t even know if I’d call it a project. It’s very cool — but we’re not on the ball with like a promo kit or any of that. We just like to get up and do it whenever.”

No name, no promo kit? What the heck have these people been putting on flyers for the last year and a half?

“Well, we’re calling it the Melissa Perkins Band, which just makes me cringe every time I say it because I wasn’t blessed with a stage name,” Perkins says. “I don’t know what my parents were thinking. It was a nice premise, you know ‘Sweet Melissa,’ the Allman Brothers, they were hippies, it was cool, whatever. They were feeling the love but they didn’t like grab something cool out of the box. So you’ve just got to work with what you’ve got and that’s what we’ve got.”

A burgeoning college career is also something she’s got, which keeps Perkins busy and studious enough. While she would rather be studying in Bloomington, Indiana she’s content with the quality education she’s receiving at IPFW. The Paul Harding High School graduate owes a bit of thanks to her persistent grandmother for a love of reading that has contributed to success in school.

“As a kid, I never read a lot. My grandma just was on a mission to get me to read,” Perkins says. “She was going to make me write. I really rebelled against it. I rebel against authority somewhat. A gentle prodding is okay or constructive criticism is okay but somebody sort of imposing their will on you is not okay with me. And so I could have probably gotten started a lot earlier, because once I did start reading, I really latched onto it — and loved it.”

Having recently read Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Perkins finds herself in awe of the great American novelist.

“It’s sort of about his time in Paris as a young man and what his life was like,” Perkins says. “He talks about his writings. It’s sort of like a series of vignettes. It doesn’t flow like a novel. It’s sort of a memoir.

“It’s easy to see why he was one of the greatest writers of our time. He’s got a very simple, straightforward, very descriptive style, and it appeals to me.”

We should all know by now that you can’t judge a band by its name — except in the case of the Melissa Perkins Band, when it’s not such a bad idea. Perhaps it’s the book that you can’t tell by its cover — but don’t tell that to easy reader Perkins, who has chosen several tomes for reading due wholly to their attractive fronts.

“If somebody else is talking about it and it sounds interesting, I’ll go and check it out,” Perkins says of her reading picks. “A lot of things I find are just random. I like the cover so I pick it up and it ends up being really cool.