It was another record hot day in October, so once again I sallied forth.  A young woman with a video camera gave me a fiver to record me.  “You’re so happy, in this beautiful setting, on this beautiful day.”  She said she’d send me the link, but so far I haven’t got it.

A small boy dumped some change in my case.

A group of high-schoolers from the Grace Church School came by.  They had been assigned to film something whimsical.  “You think I’m whimsical enough?”

“You’re the whimsicalest,” said the girl with the camera.  The kids donned leis, lined up, and danced to “The Hukilau Song” while the camera rolled.

“Your church is famous,” I told a boy as I took back his lei.  “Edith Wharton was married there.”

He turned a blank face to me.  It’s possible that I too had never heard of Edith Wharton until college – who remembers?  “Look it up.”

Glancing into my case, I spotted 2 more fivers and then some.  I’d been playing for barely 30 minutes and it was already a very good day.

People walked up to me with money in their hands at a regular clip.  A Brazilian woman did a credible hula for $2.  A Chinese woman dropped a fiver for a photo.  It turned out she was an ABC, Australian-born Chinese.  “What do you call Argentine-born Chinese, or Armenian or Austrian?  You need to start using subscripts.”

A pear-shaped man walked up from the bench near the water and gave me 3 tightly folded singles.  “I do believe you are the happiest man in New York today,” he told me.  I had to agree.  Later I saw him sitting with his pear-shaped wife.  At the end of “That’s My Weakness Now,” they applauded enthusiastically.

With $27.83 cents to show for it, it had been a superlatively whimsical, and happy day.