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