After more than a week, I made my way back to the park.  At the entrance, the pink begonias and a swath of green and white lamium were doing well, and, behind the benches, the workhorse roses, pink and red, provided great color.  At the Imagine Mosaic, one of the platoon guitarists was between songs.  He looked up as I passed.  “I got the same shirt,” he said.

“It’s the original Tom Selleck, Magnum PI,” I said.

Under the gaze of Daniel Webster, another cloud of spent clover rose above the lawn.

Center stage was mine.  I’d barely tuned up when 2 tweens stopped to hula.  In quick succession, another girl of about the same age, from DC, wanted to hula, then 2 cousins from Idaho took a turn.  I had $5 in my case before I came home from the hukilau, and started my set in earnest.

A teenage girl walked by and dropped 60 cents.  She turned out to be one of the few today who did not hula.

A girl of 9 or 10 showed some interest, but when I asked if she had time for a hula, she shook her head no, only to return a short while later to say, “I changed my mind.”  She was from Puerto Rico.  She danced with a rocking motion, laughing all the while her mom took pictures.  For a change of pace, I sang “My Little Grass Shack.”  Mom contributed $2.

A young teen danced and walked away.  She came back with 4 quarters.

A group of 10 kids talked each other into a group dance.  I tore open a new package of leis to accommodate them.  One of them, a slender girl named Hallie, was pushed to the front, where she led the group in a sinewy interpretation of “The Hukilau Song.”  She said she was from Colombia.  “The country, not South Carolina.”  Another few dollars floated into my case.

A Russian man and his family were enchanted by my solar-powered hula girls.  “How much?”

“Five dollars,” I told him.  He started to bargain, but I held firm, and showed him the plastic shell that would protect it in his luggage.  He picked up the pink doll, which was broken.  I took it from him and showed his son how it worked, while the man contemplated the green or the yellow.  By this time, the enchantment had faded.  “If you really like these, you can probably get 2 for 5 on the internet,” I told him.

He laughed and said, “Thank you for your honesty.”  They walked off, but the man soon came back with a dollar for my time.

A young girl sat at the edge of the fountain with a book.  “Have you got time for a hula today?”

“Maybe later,” she said, “with my sister.”

A girl from Nashville went to the hukilau, and a short time later 2 more dancers from Nashville did the same.

A Mexican boy danced at his mother’s insistence.  Behind her camera, she swayed to the music, while the boy rather woodenly flapped his arms.

In addition to the saffron-robed begging Buddhists, who shove prayer flags in peoples’ hands, Bethesda Fountain is also home to teenage boys selling candy for playground equipment.  One of them bopped up to me and said, “I got lots of change for you, bud.”

Five girls from Staten Island stopped to hula.  “What fun,” one of them said, taking a single from her purse.  Perhaps some of the others had also made donations, but I didn’t notice, because the young girl who had been reading returned with her sister.  Each of them had a dollar for me.

Toward the end of my set, the sisters came back with their mom.  “I didn’t get a chance to take a picture,” she said.  I put leis back on them and posed for the shot, after which mom put another dollar in my case.

I counted $25.02, my second best take of the season.  Judged by the number of hulas danced, however, it was an all-time high.