K&W in Laguna Beach -- Saturday, 04Oct2014

Really great night! We had friendly happy people making requests and hanging around to listen all night long. I chose the first three songs and didn't have to choose another one all night long (unless/until I wanted to).

We started around 7:30, and there were only two young homeless guys there. Warren asked them if they'd move over to the side bench, and they just did. Had a bit of trouble from a slightly drunk little middle-aged homeless lady, but not too bad. But more on her later.

We had lots of audience interaction, which makes it so much more fun. I think it was because the environment started off friendly, and stayed that way. Three ladies came by and the college-age daughter asked for "Kiss the Girl". Another lady asked for "Puff, the Magic Dragon", and they danced to it. Never thought of that as a dance tune...

An Asian lady and her boyfriend came by and listened for a while. Another guy came up and said that he'd been looking for me at Spectrum. I told him that I wouldn't be playing Spectrum anymore because they changed the way it's booked. The Asian lady said, "You should play Spectrum." I said that I'd love to, but they won't let me. She repeated, "You should play Spectrum", said that she "lived there" (presumably in the apartments across the street) and then insisted that I *would* play Spectrum, as if she had any say in it. I told her to take my card and give me a call if/when she got me booked.

The little drunk Mexican lady was being a bit distracting, but not nearly as bad as I've had to endure from some of the drunk guys. At one point, she disappeared across the street, and I was hoping she was gone, but she reappeared, walking across the crosswalk and through the crowd, swinging some piece of cloth from her upraised wrist. It was quite a hazard, and as she walked through the crowd, people had to move aside to not get hit. She went over to the ice cream shop, then came back and sat down in an empty spot at the end of the bench.

Pretty quick a cop showed up, beckoned her by name and asked her to follow him across the street, which she obediently did. I was thinking, "Wow! Thanks for removing this drunk distraction, but where are you when it's really bad?" Then three more cop cars pulled up, flashing their lights like it was a cartel bust. One of the cops came over and was asking people if they had been sitting there long, presumably to then ask if they'd seen whatever the issue was. When my song was over he asked me if I'd seen any naked ladies, and I was pretty sure that I'd remember something like that...

Turns out that what the drunk lady was swinging over her head was her shorts, so she was wandering around bottomless. Now, she's quite short, and her T-shirt was long, so, I guess from my high vantage point, she looked perfectly normal. But apparently from the vantage point of the people on the bench, not so much (and one of the ladies called the cops).

The cops left the red and blue flashers going on their cars, which was pretty distracting and made it hard to read the music, but I tried to pretend it was "stage lighting". After a while, they had gotten some jeans and handcuffs on her, and took her (and the distraction) away. Apparently it only takes 4 cop cars and half-a-dozen cops to subdue a 5'-3" Mexican lady.

And it's good to know that even in Laguna Beach, there are some lines you can't cross...

I had forgotten my iPad which serves as my music book, but fortunately, the paper copy lives in the van, so I used that. It has all the songs on the Request List, but it meant that I couldn't do any new songs. Except -- all week I'd been working on "Don't Let Me Be Lonely Tonight", and I guess I'd gone through it so many times that I'd memorized it, 'cuz I fired it up for fun, and went all the way through it, surprising myself.

My previous Bluetooth camera shutter remote has quit working, so I got a new, smaller, cheaper one, and this was its first test outing. I rigged up a way that I can step on it with my right foot (as my left handles the harmony box), instead of mounting it on the guitar neck like before. That took too much coordination to try to press the button with my thumb and still squeeze the chords with my fingers. And I couldn't reach it at all if the song happened to be capoed up, which about half of them are. Hopefully I'll get some useful, if muddy in the dim light, shots.