K&W in Laguna Beach -- Saturday, 15Nov2014

I arrived about 6:30 to the surprise of a quartet of Dickensian carolers out on The Corner. (A) Kinda early in the year, and (B), Carolers, busking! I figured they wouldn't be there long, but when I got there they immediately started to leave, asking me if I wanted to play. I said that sure, I wanted to play, but I wanted to hear a song first! The alto asked me which one, so I asked for my favorite carol, "God Rest Ye, Merry Gentlemen", and she said that they didn't know it. What?!? The bass clarified that it's a five-part song (it is?), and their fifth wasn't there. They settled on "Angels We Have Heard on High", and did a respectable job of it, and then took off.

I inherited a young family as an audience, and let the little girls look through the list as I set up. Imagine my (lack of) surprise when they picked "Let It Go". One of the girls wanted to come up and sing along, but the other one didn't but got dragged up anyway, so they spent most of the song wrestling with each other over it. Anna and Elsa would have been so ashamed...

Later on, another family with two little girls came by, and they did their ballet moves (in clogs!) to "Let It Be", and then requested -- you guessed it -- "Let It Go". This pair just wanted to dance to it, not sing it. Which made for a mystery when the grandfather told me that they were flying to New York on Monday to be on the TV chat show, "The View", re-creating their viral YouTube hit singing it.

It turned into a pretty good night. For a while we had a pretty big crowd, asking for songs. But then the Australian bum showed up, pretty drunk on whatever not-smart and not-water he totes around in his "Smart Water" bottle. He was getting right in the face of this nice local couple, just as a cop car drove around the corner. The lady leapt up and flagged him down, told him what was up, and he parked, pulled the drunk out of the group, and gave him a stern talking to. He sobered up quick, and came back after a while but much subdued. Hopefully the chilling effect will last a few weeks...

The kind of great side effect was that the cops were all standing around dealing with this guy while I kept playing for the clearly appreciative crowd. I expect that the cops noticed that I'm a Good Thing, not Too Loud, and their helping me with the drunk kind of put us on The Same Side. Maybe an illusion, but it made me less worried that they'll decide to have A Talk with me sometime.

As she was leaving, the lady who flagged down the cop was commiserating with us about having to deal with this drunk guy all the time. I told her that he wasn't the only one, and not even close to the worst of them. She said that since the election, there were new city council members that were aiming to clean up this homeless hang-out problem, somehow, though some members were opposing the idea. I don't know what kind of plan they have that would work -- lots of cities have this same problem -- but just enforcing the "drunk in public" laws would be a start.