K&W in Laguna Beach -- Saturday, 05Apr2014

Nice weather, and it must be a vacation week abroad because there were lots of foreign visitors out, along with the usual locals. We had lots of nice people right from the beginning, but pretty soon some local characters showed up and monopolized the bench and the somewhat drunk guy wanted to chat up the visitors, which generally just scared them away.

I finally despaired of getting any kind of audience together with them there, so I "took a break" to try to bore them away. Which actually worked after a while, and had the added benefit of letting me sit down for a while.

Earlier in the wee, I rediscovered James Taylor's version of "Handyman" in my songbook, which I had worked up but abandoned because it was just too high for me. But my range has moved up quite a bit, and it's somewhat feasible now, if I'm well warmed up. So I brought it out in public for the first time, and it seemed to work pretty well.

A nice lady listened for a few songs and then came up and announced that she was from "Chile, South America!". She asked me if I knew any Jim Croce, and I said no, because people always mean "Time In a Bottle" when they ask that, and I don't do that one. But she finally came up with the song name that she meant, and it was "I'll Have To Say I Love You In a Song", which is the only Croce song that I *do* know. So I fired it up and she danced around in front of me singing along. That was sweet.

We got cut off prematurely ("only" three hours) when the accessory battery went dead. I'm pretty sure I just recharged it wrong, but we went home with pretty short tips -- apparently the bulk of the tipping happens later in the evening. But I did sell three CDs, so somebody liked what we were playing...