Another kinda slow night -- I don't remember it being this slow last winter. I did have a pretty constant stream of packs of kids, and some isolated young families to play to, but a general "sit a while" audience never materialized. Maybe people just aren't really prepared for the cold yet, so I get some people to pause on their way past, but they're not ready to sit in one place for any length of time.
Or maybe it was the plague of Jesus people who were hassling folks and chasing them away. It wasn't just some isolated prosthelytizers either -- there were several groups covering the place. This *is* the U. S. of A., and they're free to believe what they want, but their freedom to swing a fist ends where my face begins, and I'd just as soon they'd swing somewhere else and quit scaring my audience off.
But I had fun playing to the people who braved the phalanx to come listen to a few tunes. "Jingle Bells" hauls distant little kids over pretty well -- along with lots of teenage girls, who are also inexplicably into "Holly Jolly Christmas", apparently. A young couple came up and the lady asked me the million dollar question: "Do you know any James Taylor?"
I got to sing my new "Merry Christmas, Darling" a couple of times, though nobody was there to hear it. But the setup was sounding unusually good and I was having fun just singing, people or no.
Somehow I made $62, though half of that was a ten and a twenty. I'm not sure how that happened -- usually I can tell when someone likes me enough to put in a decent tip, or when they're buying a CD, but nobody really seemed to be hovering over the table this time. A nice surprise, though.
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