Not too bad, for November. Sparsely attended, of course, but some really nice people came by.
Right at the beginning, two ladies showed up, separately. One was a nice older lady who listened for a few songs and then came up to put a buck in the jar but also to give me "a gift" of her handmade soaps. The other was Wendy, a sometimes-sweet but more-often-drunk burnt-out hippie lifetime Laguna street person.
I was nearly overcome with the scent of eucalyptus and fennel, and presumed that Wendy had somehow come across a bottle of scented oil and had bathed in it. People were avoiding her, since she was drunk and even more disheveled than usual, but it turned out that, of her faults, the stifling aroma wasn't one of them -- it was the soap sitting on the trashcan/merch table beside me. Sorry Wendy, I misjudged you. Though only a little...
But before all that, just as I arrived a guy came by and astutely figured out that I was going to play some music. He asked what kind of stuff I play, and I told him, and he said that he liked that kind of music, and took off from there, literally never stopping talking for the 20 or so minutes it took me to set up. It was really quite amazing -- once I realized that his marble collection was incomplete, and since I couldn't hear or decode half of what he was saying, I stopped responding in any way, but he managed to ramble on, and on, and on. I'm pretty sure it was some kind of Tourette Syndrome deal.
Fortunately, he finally got bored watching me set up and wandered into the ice cream shop, where the girl behind the counter managed to offend him sufficiently to get him yelling at her, but eventually stopping away, flinging curses back at her. I'll have to remember to thank her someday, 'cuz it was gonna be hard to play against his continuous commentary...
But other than those two, everyone else was great. Some kids came by and requested "Pure Imagination" from (the original) "Willy Wonka", and an older lady stopped to gush over how great that was. One nice lady stopped and listened until her husband and kids showed up, and then came back after they'd had their dinner.
Earlier in the week I'd practiced playing some of my rock and roll dance tunes with my iPhone drum machine app, and I'd clocked the actual beats per minute of the original recordings. I pulled several of them out when it was getting late and empty, and virtually all of them seem *way* too slow at the "right" speed. What does that say about my rock and roll sensibilities?
And around midnight, when it was nearly deserted, some high school boys came by and asked if I knew any Justin Bieber. Probably as a joke -- but I did learn his most famous song ("Baby") to play for the teenies that prowl at Spectrum back in 2010, so I busted it out. They freaked out and started dancing and jumping around, and suddenly there were a half-dozen girls there too, dancing to what qualifies as a "classic" for them. Instant party -- but it disappeared just as quickly when the song was over. Oh well.
And just before we quit, the guy who works at Disney showed up. A month ago he had taken my CD and kids' song list and card to try to get me in at Downtown Disney, and I had all but given up on him. But he did deliver the stuff and his enthusiastic recommendation to the Booking Director -- he just hadn't heard anything back. So that's probably dead in the water, but I have the Booking guy's name now, so I might be able to pursue it -- but probably not until after the holidays.
The people who work at this "Senior Daycare" program assure me that nobody remembers my last visit or that they've already heard me play those songs. I guess it's specifically a program for memory-issue people, so that's probably true for many of them.
But I can tell it's not true for all of them, so I tried to do some different songs this time. In particular, I made myself do "Since I Fell For You", which is a real screamer, so I have to really put it out there. But several of them were falling asleep (it's just after lunch, and most of my stuff is pretty mellow, so, understandable), so I knocked it out to try and liven the place up a bit. And it may have worked, too.
But I also did the ones they like to sing along to, "Georgia On My Mind" and "South of the Border", and couldn't resist doing "Cool Water", just 'cuz it's from 1948 so even the oldest ones there should know it, and it sounds *so* cool with the harmony box.
It was apparently our "turn" at The Corner, so I went down at 6:00 just to make sure nobody else snagged it first. I was up and running by 6:20, and had several families with little kids for the first hour, so I played lots of Disney songs, and had one little girl brave enough to get up and sing "Let It Go" with me.
I'd been on vacation for a while and since I hadn't played much guitar for three weeks, I was worried that I'd mess up a lot, but it all came back pretty well. Like riding a bike, I guess. And since it's pretty much winter, the foot and auto traffic is down, so it was quieter than usual and my guitar and vocals sounded pretty good out there.
A nice lady came by and was listening and mentioned that it was her birthday. Of course, I gave her a tiara, but a couple of hours later she came back and insisted on giving it back to me. She thanked me for making her feel like a princess for the evening, though.
Warren had wandered off to find a bathroom, and a guy came up a bit *too* close to me while I was playing a song, and suddenly just reached out and plucked a string of my guitar. When he reached out to do it again, I smelled the alcohol, and turned away from him so he couldn't reach the guitar. He gave up and walked away, and fell down in the crosswalk as he left. "Falling down drunk", as they say.
Around 10:00 it got pretty deserted, so I fired up my two new songs. All through my vacation, the Temptations' "Ain't Too Proud to Beg" was running through my head for some reason, so when I got home to my guitar, I worked it up. And, even weirder, I somehow got the notion that I could pull off the Jackson 5's "I Want You Back" that baby Groot dances to at the end of "Guardians of the Galaxy", so I worked up a version of that, too. They both actually play and sing OK for me, they're just really "out of my wheelhouse", and sound weird (to me, anyway) coming out of my mouth. But they might work for the bar-hopping crowd.
Which started to show up around 11:00, so I started playing rock and roll songs, bolstered by how much better the new guitar strums than the old one. The crowds were too thin, though, to get much of anything started, but since getting to play down there at all is so hard to come by, I kept trying until 1am when the battery died.
Still, it was a pretty good night, especially for such a cold and wintery one. The character of the money in the tip jar is starting to change -- we're making as much money as ever, but there's far fewer ones and more "big money" to make up for it. Am I more deserving of bigger tips, or is the economy improving?
