1. Spring Has Sprung

    0

    April 22, 2015 by admin

    Hyacinths, daffodils and pheasant’s eye narcissi are in their glory; white tulips are massed all over the park. Magnolia, pink and white, have already started to drop their petals; gaudy yellow forsythia line the paths. The early trees, elm and maple, are showing green, while finger-sized shoots can be seen on the dogwood, wisteria, cherry, and even the horse chestnut, which appears not to have died again this year despite the blight.

    Rakeem, playing “The Girl from Ipanema” on his sax, occupied center stage at Bethesda Fountain, so I moved on to my second favorite spot, beneath a maple on the path toward the Boat House Restaurant. An opaque green fence blocked my view of the lake, and all in all I felt a little hemmed in, but once I tuned up and started my set with “Making Love Ukulele Style” I might as well have stood atop Mauna Kea.

    A young couple walked by, stopped to confer, then came back to buy a CD. Mr. Ukulele was bound for Brazil. A man with several cameras around his neck emptied his pockets of $1.07 in change. Perhaps he had taken my picture from afar, but it seemed to me it was money for my music, not my image. An old man broke from his tour group to donate, and a Belgian woman stopped to hula but was hurried away by her male companion.

    A fifty-something man wanted to chat. “You look like you’re having a ball,” he said. “I should come out here. You know, I invented a device that makes bubbles as big as a car.”

    “There’s a man who does big bubbles by the fountain,” I told him.

    “I know that guy. I taught him everything he knows.”

    A young man with a fishing rod stopped near me and, leaning his rod against the fence, rolled a joint. Given my own outlaw status, I played on without notice, but when he lit up and clouds of marijuana smoke wafted over the path, I rethought my live-and-let-live policy. People hurried by; one teenager noticed and asked for a puff. Before I could ask him to move on, however, he moved on, dropping a dollar in my case for my forbearance.

    I had a family of four doing the hula when Vasiliy came by, pushing his wheeled bass fiddle. A classically trained musician from Ukraine, Vasiliy was heading toward the Arcade to join John Boyd and his choir. He watched dad make a contribution, then asked me, “Is this your first time out?”

    I told him I’d been out a few times already. “I played all through the fall,” he said, “up to Christmas. Too cold, this is better.”

    The crowds thinned after 1pm. Toward the end of my set I was singing to the birds, specifically, a fat robin pecking the lawn, and a bright red cardinal singing louder than me from a branch of the leafless mulberry tree. Another bird I could not identify, with black body, yellow beak and florescent blue head, danced among the rocks, then flew out of sight as I approached for a closer look.

    Category Uncategorized | Tags: ,

  2. $110 of Aloha

    0

    April 16, 2015 by admin

    The day started out cool and windy, and ended warm and windy. Yet another guitarist serenaded the throngs at the Image Mosaic, this time with “Here Comes the Sun.”

    The water in Central Park was turned on. The sparkling splash of Bethesda Fountain accompanied me throughout my set, and will so now until fall. On the masts flanking the lake were hung long green pennants that snapped in the wind, the metal halyards clanging noisily.

    Before I could ask a group of middle-schoolers if they had time for a hula, they were pawing through my leis. We danced a single verse of “The Hukilau,” while the adult leader of the group waited impatiently nearby. As they ran off, a few kids dropped singles into my case; one girl, with purple highlights in her hair, ran back from the Arcade in order to make a belated contribution.

    The day was extraordinarily beautiful. Two moms with their toddlers listened from the bench. One of the kids, about 2 years old, bounced to the music, approached cautiously, then ran back to familiar arms. A woman walked by and thanked me with a buck. The toddler approached again, ran back. Finally, holding mom’s hand, the toddler made it all the way and dropped a Susan B. “And the other one?” asked mom. It is a well-known phenomenon: children tend to pocket money meant for me.

    A man my age walked up with a big smile on his face. “You keep the real songs alive. I love the low poetry of the lyrics. I can’t stand what passes for music today.”

    I agreed. “Nobody rhymes ‘daily’ with ‘ukulele’ anymore, or my personal favorite, ‘hula’ and ‘Honolula,’ although Dylan did rhyme ‘Honolula’ with ‘Ashtabula’ in the ‘70s.”

    “Don’t you get discouraged that so many people just ignore you?”

    I opened my arms to take in the magnificent day. He smiled with understanding and put $2 in my case. “You’ve got the right attitude.”

    People do indeed ignore me, although I figure for every $1 put in my case I bring $5 worth of aloha.

    A Hispanic family gathered around. “Have you got time for a hula today?”

    “How much?”

    “Nothing, it’s free.” So the 4 children, ranging in age from 6 to 16, donned leis and hula-ed away, laughing and jostling each other while dad shot video. When they finished and moved on to other delights, a middle child ran back with a dollar.

    It was a big day for Brits, where they love the uke. “My favorite movie is ‘Sons of the Desert,’” one man told me, so together we sang out a few bars of “Honolulu Baby.” It was a $10 performance, boosting me to $22 for the day.

    Category Uncategorized | Tags: , ,

  3. A Quiet Monday

    0

    April 14, 2015 by admin

    A week has seen some progress in the park. The daffodils are out in full; the forsythia is starting to show color. They’ve laid out beds of mostly purple pansies behind the benches at the W. 72nd St. park entrance, giving the impression that spring is far more advanced than it is deeper in the park. Still, if the magnolia buds are fattening, can the cherry blossoms be far behind?

    Past the Imagine Mosaic guitarist (“A Day in the Life”), on the outcropping on which is attached a bronze plaque listing the 121 countries who would give peace a chance if they weren’t so busy making war, sat Randy with his dobro. In response to “How was your winter?” he listed his various health issues, adding cheerfully that Medicare, for which he recently became eligible, was a godsend.

    The crowd at the fountain was thin. My first hula dancer, a young jogger just finishing her workout, had no money. Another woman gave me a dollar and asked to take my picture. I saw two regulars, my elderly West Indian woman who crosses the park, east to west, every day between 12:30 and 1:00, and an eastside matron taking the air with a friend. She wiggled her fingers in a tootle-loo to me. “You know that guy?” I heard her friend ask.

    By 1:30 almost everyone was gone, except a 30-something couple, just finishing their lunch, and a park worker, on his hands and knees, digging knots of weeds out from between the stones of the fountain. “Don’t you have Round-Up for that?”

    “Too close to the lake,” he said.

    The couple packed up, tossed their refuse in a trash can, and $2 in my case. That brought the day’s take to $9.

    Category Uncategorized | Tags:

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Archives