1. After the Heat Wave – 2

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    July 28, 2019 by admin

    The heat wave may have broken, but it was still hot.  At the Imagine Mosaic, it was uncharacteristically still; no Beatle’s music today.  Bethesda Fountain, on the other hand, was an amplified mess.  Two guitars, a violin and an accordion blasted bad behavior from all four quadrants, while a battalion of aggressively begging Buddhists wove through the crowd, handing out amulets and just as quickly snatching them back when they didn’t get paid.

    I was happy to take up my position in the shade under the Norway Maple.  After a while, a 3-year-old girl walked by with her mom or nanny.  She was taken with my solar-powered hula girls, and every time the adult took her hand and asked her to come along, she yanked it free and squatted down to continue studying them. In exasperation, the nanny/mom tossed me a dollar, swept the girl up under her arm and marched her squealing away.

    “Have you got time for a hula today?”  A girl of 9 or 10 came forward.  With a lei around her neck, equipped with my hula instructions, she danced awkwardly, while her dad filmed and her mom hula-ed behind the camera.  “Come show her how it’s done,” I said to mom, waving a lei.  She took it and joined her daughter for a touching mother-daughter dance.  A grinning dad gave me a buck.

    Like my last outing, with 15 minutes to go, I still hadn’t made carfare.  Then, as if that realization had conjured them up, an Italian couple stopped to ask about my hula girls.  “Quanto questo?”

    “Five dollars.”

    “Cinque,” he says to his wife.  They discuss the color, turquoise or yellow.  Deciding on turquoise, he hands the yellow doll back to me and says, “Quattro.”

    “Cinque,” I correct him.

    “Va bene.”  He gives me a fiver, and, leaving, he and his wife exchange words. She flashes me a smile; he gives me another dollar.

    Singing “Little Grass Shack,” in wonder at how well the universe treats this “little Hawaiian, a homesick island boy,” I was graced with another miracle: at my final chord, a tall blonde floated a fiver into my case

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  2. After the Heat Wave – 1

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    July 26, 2019 by admin

    The heat wave broke this week.  Wednesday was warm and clear with cool breezes blowing from the north.  A new batch of begonias brightened the hill on the other side of the Central Park West wall.  Deep in the underbrush, a single stand of white phlox captures the eye.  Cleome and gomphrena populate the area behind the benches, while the rose bushes, devoid of roses, have only wine-red growing tips to show.

    At the Imagine Mosaic, the guitarist sings “Hey, Jude,” accompanied by a blond soprano who shattered the upper registers with her “better, better, better, better.”

    Past jewelweed and astilbe, around the corner from Daniel Webster, the jazz combo performs from the American Songbook.  The park is packed.  At Bethesda Fountain, three amplified buskers, a violin and 2 guitars, are duking it out.  On this, among the most beautiful days of the summer, I easily summoned the aloha spirit and kept walking to the maple, where 3 caricaturists were duking it out.  As I set up I asked the closest one, “You don’t mind, do you?”

    “Not at all,” he said.  “It’s nice background music for me.”

    At the end of the first 30 minutes, no one had given me anything.  During the next 30 minutes, a 40-something Spanish man dumped $1.10 in coin into my case.  In the final 30 minutes, I stopped two 30-something guys and talked them into a hula.  It was a sedate interpretation of “The Hukilau Song” until one of the men broke loose with waving arms, yelps and leaps.  He then tore off his lei with a dramatic gesture and handed it back to me, along with a $5 bill.

    By then, with $6.10 in my pocket, it was time to go home.

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  3. 90-Degree Tuesday

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    July 17, 2019 by admin

    Another week has passed since I last visited the park. So, with life’s obligations fast filling my calendar, despite Tuesday’s 90-degree heat, I ventured out.  In the shade of Central Park West, half the begonias have been replaced with coleus, their thirsty green and burgundy leaves already parched.   The roses behind the benches struggled to produce a second crop, but those across from the so-called Peace Rock bloomed abundantly, pink and red, singles and doubles in profusion.

    Dominic, the big-bubble man, shook the soapy water from his hand and gave me a fist-bump.  “We were just talking about you, me and Colin, where’ve you been?”

    It was just noon and Colin, the cowboy, wasn’t there.  Perhaps he had sense enough to come in from the sun.  Many tourists, sensibly, chose cool marble museums over Bethesda Fountain in this heat, but not all.  My first hula dancers weren’t even tourists, but an au pair and her 2 young charges, a girl of 3 or so and her older brother.  Brother wouldn’t dance, but the girls had a ball at the hukilau; the au pair tipped me with a fiver.

    A tall young woman from Montreal got through the vamp to “The Hukilau Song,” and was starting to remove her lei, when a 60-something woman walking by began singing along.  She knew the hand motions too, so I quickly got a lei around her neck and directed the Montrealer to follow the older woman’s lead.  She told me she’d learned it in grade school, in 1959, when Hawaii became a state.

    There was a large group of high schoolers from Argentina, many of whom danced a hula and threw money in my case, and another slightly less large group of scouts from Sweden, who neither danced nor donated.

    I was relieved to get to the end of my set.  I sang my last few songs to no one, and, precisely at 1:30, said “Aloha, New York” and sat down.  The change was too hot to count, so I dumped it in the shade of my ukulele case and counted the bills, $13.  I packed up the solar-powered hula girls, the leis, CDs and other paraphernalia, by which time I could handle the coins, $3.68.

    “I see you counting your money,” the ice-cold-water man said with a grin.  He was hauling a cooler behind him; it bounced over the uneven bricks.  “See you tomorrow.”

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