Keith at Irvine Spectrum -- 26Oct2012

Maybe I was just tired. I had a tough time getting "into it". There were a couple of people, here and there, that would stop to listen, but I couldn't get much interaction going until very late.

Except for a batch of little kids who just *had* to be up on the stage. At first there were three fairly well-behaved little girls, and it was nice. Then more, and more, until there were eight of them, only occasionally in danger of knocking the music stand over. But their presence made the older boys in the crowd bolder, and pretty soon I had strafing runs of unruly boys zooming across the stage, coming very close to tripping on the wires and/or knocking down the iPad. I let it all go, but it put a crimp in my performance to have to worry about all this stuff while trying to sing the songs. I probably shouldn't have given them that inch...

After a while, I was down to just one little 2-year-old, who really just wanted to be on the stage. She was too young to really care about the songs, but she liked being up there with me. And since I had no one else to sing to, I sang to her for a while.

I also had two teen-age girls come by who remembered me from when they turned cartwheels in front of the Fountain Stage at my gig in February. They were quite thrilled that I'd learned songs by Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber in the interim.

Finally, very late, some couples showed up who were really listening, and asking for songs. One of the couples wanted to dance, and the guy bribed me to play "Brown Eyed Girl", which is in the book, but I rarely do 'cuz I don't think I pull it off at all. But they stayed and stayed, and I ended up playing until 11:30, when we'd all had enough. I guess that last half-hour partially made up for the previous five. I did bring home $82, so I guess it wasn't quite as awful as it felt. Maybe I was just tired.