After a week of cold and rain, I returned to the park on the first nice day in October. Cleome, asters, begonia, and the fluffy purple button of bloom, which has been growing in clumps behind the benches since August, are still going strong, while the growing tips of the rosa rugosa have managed to produce yet another crop of papery pink flowers. Despite the rain, someone has ordered the sprinklers to be turned on, so water is pooling over the saturated lawns.

At Bethesda Fountain, a giant peace sign made of 40,000 mini cupcakes, compliments of Baked by Melissa, adorns the plaza. I’m told that it was created in honor of John Lennon’s 75th birthday on Friday, and has earned a Guinness World Record.

I set up at center stage and immediately broke into “Get Out and Get Under the Moon” for a toddler who couldn’t take his eyes off me. Mom allowed the kid to bop around for a while, then grabbed his hand and led him away. Other walkaways included 2 little girls, who, separately, put on leis and danced to “The Hukilau Song,” and a Dutch woman who informed me, after having her husband snap a picture of us, that her daughter had danced a hula with me 4 years ago.

A young man spent quite a bit of time in my face, taking pictures. “Did you get a good shot?” I asked. “Good, now come do a hula. A hula for a picture, it’s only fair.”

He begged off, until a group of 20-somethings, similarly dressed in t-shirts proclaiming “Top of the Rock,” egged him on. They were involved in some team-building exercise for the locale/event-space at Rockefeller Center. Under peer pressure, he danced for a few bars, then took off his lei and ran up the path to rejoin his friends.

After almost 1 hour, my first dollar came from a woman photographer, who took her pics and walked off.

Jim, the big bubble man, came by with 100 mini cupcakes in a pizza-sized bakery box. I ate one; it was rich and delicious, but another one, let alone another 99, would have sent me into cardiac arrest.

The Top of the Rock folks wanted a photo before they left. They put on leis and massed around me, a selfie stick appeared in the sky and we smiled up at it. After an abbreviated hula, they gathered up their stuff, including what appeared to be a jigsaw puzzle of Rock Center, collected $3 among them and added it to my case.

Two teens from Tennessee stopped to dance. They seemed quite tickled to be dancing the hula in New York. Their mom, who caught the act on video, tossed another $3 in my case.

An old woman walking by gave me a dollar. A mom with 2 young daughters, neither of whom wanted to hula, dug out 4 quarters for me.

What started out as slow day, picked up enough to bring my total to double digits. On my way out of the park, I started passing people with boxes of cupcakes. In fact, every person on the bench at the entrance had a box in his/her lap. Outside the park, along Central Park West, the Baked by Melissa truck was parked, and members of the peace sign crew, having boxed up 40,000 cupcakes into 400 boxes, were handing them out of the back of truck like aid workers handing out provisions after a natural disaster. People sitting on the benches along CPW, stretching several blocks north, tasted and traded cupcakes: lemon for vanilla, strawberry for chocolate.

From somewhere high above the Dakota, John Lennon must have watched the festivities and smiled.