Monday, April 11, 2011

Keith at Irvine Spectrum -- Sun, 10Apr2011

Nicer weather than last Sunday afternoon, but fewer people. Maybe it was *too* nice, and they were all at the beach.

Started off really well, with a bunch of Persian kids, led by brash and bold 8-year-old ("I'm the oldest one here!") Samantha and her twin-brother cousins, jumping right in. She had lots of requests right off, which is nice, for a while, but she ended up trying to hijack the whole show. After a while, she was requesting songs she'd never heard of, just to be the one in charge. Pretty young to be such a control freak already -- I'd give this one a wide berth, 8-year-old boys.

I did assemble a pretty good group of young dancers, and a few moms camped out right in front on blankets -- glad to have their kids distracted so they could get into some serious mom-talk. Samantha, not being a dancer herself, kept trying to steer me into some non-dance tunes (chosen at random), but her feminine wiles were wasted on me.

After it cooled down and the Sunday Afternoon Family Outing crowd left, it was pretty empty, except for the occasional group passing through and getting caught up in one of my songs and hanging out for a while. Ended up with $50 and some change in the jar, but that was only because a guy came through with two small daughters and dropped a twenty in, before I had even really gotten started. They didn't even stay long enough to hear a song, much less request one, or pick up a CD. Thanks, dude, but what was that about?

As I was packing up, a young woman came up and told me that I had "sounded really good", and then asked if I took checks, or only cash. Um, what? Then it occurred to me that she wanted to buy a CD, not leave a tip, so I told her to just take one. She did, and a card, and then asked me how much I charge for a gig. Taken by surprise (again), and wondering if she meant "this one" or if she intended to hire me, I decided the latter and managed to say "about two hundred", and she said she'd "shoot me an email". That probably won't happen of course, but it's flattering anyway.

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