K&W in Laguna Beach -- Saturday, 21Nov2015

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.