K&W in Laguna Beach -- Saturday, 07Nov2015

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?