K&W in Laguna Beach -- Saturday, 27Sept2014

Got there at about 7:30, and there was nobody else playing. The great part about starting later is that I have battery life to play later, and we did -- until a little after midnight.

Only one homeless kid, and also the large lady who mimes my songs. Fortunately, she wasn't as drunk as usual and was more restrained. Unfortunately, for some reason they had towels spread out on the bench, taking up even more room. I couldn't tell if they thought they were "saving seats" for their friends, or what. But at least they were at the far end, so the regular people had a place to sit.

It was a pretty great night. Lots of people came by and requested songs and hung around. At 8:30 or so, a pair of couples came by, obviously already pretty well lubricated. They arrived just as I was doing "Let It Be" for a nice proper Chinese lady, and they rudely stood right in front of her and sang along, loudly and badly. Nothing I could do about it, but it was a shame -- I preferred her company to theirs.

One of the guys asked me to play some Jethro Tull. I told him I didn't know any, but then thought better of it, since, come morning, I always regret not taking a risk the night before. So I fired up "Mother Goose", and luckily, they were drunk enough to not notice how badly it went. Later on, I also played "Father and Son" for a lady who requested it, even though it's in my "Still Learning This" section. Born to be wild...

Around 9:30, I was playing "You've Got a Friend" when a young couple came up. The guy spun around to face her, dropped to one knee, and proposed, right there in the middle of the song. I couldn't hear them, but apparently she said yes, 'cuz the cute friendly foreign people sitting next to them on the bench started applauding. After the song, the older couple standing on the other side asked, and were flabbergasted when they confirmed that, yes, he'd proposed, and she'd accepted.

The foreign people were obviously thrilled, too, and after a while the man came over and handed the groom-to-be a big wad of money as an engagement present. The girl was speechless with surprise and gratitude at these perfect strangers' generosity. I've been playing out for people for almost 13 years now, but this was my first live proposal. Flattering that the guy thought that underneath my song was his "perfect moment".

Oddly, the guy asked me to play "Fire and Rain" next, which I did, and refrained pointing out that the girl in the song had committed suicide...

I had equipment trouble all night. The guitar was getting quieter and more distorted all the time, and the distortion get terrible through "Sound of Silence", which was coincidentally a good choice, since the original recording famously features distorted guitar. I should recognize by now that the symptoms mean a dead battery in the "DI" preamp, but I didn't, and replaced the battery inside the guitar that powers its pickup. Twice.

It still didn't work, which finally made it dawn on me that it was the DI, but that one's hard to replace, jammed in the backpack, so I just wired up the guitar bypassing the DI. But pretty soon after I'd finally got the guitar sounding good, I broke the tuning peg button of my A string in half, trying to tune up. I had a nice lady waiting to hear "You'll Be In My Heart" from "Tarzan", so I tried to play it anyway, dodging that now-floppy string by playing alternate bar chord versions, but it was a mess, so that was the last song.

On the way home, at 1:30, I passed by "Robo Mike", one of the nice homeless kids. He was walking up El Toro road through the wilderness down there, so I went back and picked him up. He was pretty high (apparently his self-appointed nickname isn't a reference to "Robocop", but to "Robitussin"), but he had decided to see if his mom would let him come home.

Turns out she lives about a mile from my house, so I took him as far as the gate to the tract, but he couldn't remember the code, and she wouldn't answer the phone, so I had to just leave him there to see if he could figure out a way in. I felt bad about that, but figured, worst case, he'd have to sleep in the bushes there, so he was no worse off than sleeping in the bushes in Laguna. And at least I'd spared him the three-hour walk. On the other hand, he might have been able to make a better case to his mom a bit more sober at 4:30, than so high he couldn't put a sentence together at 1:30.

Clearly he's made some bad decisions, but he's really a pretty good kid, and I hope it works out for him and I never see him again down on The Corner.