K&W in Laguna Beach -- Sunday, 29June2014

When I got to The Corner, there were four young girls, singing a cappella songs. I figured they would give up soon enough, so I just sat on the side bench and tried to figure out what they were singing, since they were both inaudible and unintelligible. After a while they "took a break" and then decided to try a different location across the street, so I took over.

Unfortunately, they chose to stand directly across the crosswalk from me, with the brick wall to their backs, which, with all four of them singing, was pretty intrusive on my "sonic space", but they were just having fun, so I didn't mind much. It was a pretty slow day anyway, being a Sunday.

They toughed it out for a surprisingly long time, and after a while, one of them went home and got her guitar. It was ludicrous but cute that they were singing current hits, be they hip-hop, electronica, or dance music, nearly a cappella but for the few chords she knew. But of course, cute draws in the tips, so they thought they were doing great.

Blain, who appears to be independently wealthy and spends his days down on the beach spinning a Frisbee "for peace", came by. He loves my stuff, and sometimes gets ideas about what song I ought to learn. Lately he's been hounding me to learn "I Write the Book" by Elvis Costello. I checked into it, and it's not for me, but the Costello song I dearly love is "Watching the Detectives", so I worked that one up instead. I feel awfully white and geeky playing Reggae, but it occurred to me that I can't be much whiter or geekier than Costello himself...

About 8:30 it was pretty dead, but I guess dinner hour was over because we started getting lots of people, and forming pretty big crowds. One little girl came up and asked for a song I'd never heard of, so I asked her to choose a song from the Kids' List. She took it back to the bench and her mom, so I followed them over there (the benefits of being wireless). Of course, I knew what song she'd undoubtedly pick, so I started looping the intro, and when she finally pointed to "Let It Go", I just started singing it, much to their surprise.