Posts Tagged ‘Ukulele Lady’

  1. Rainy Friday

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    May 9, 2014 by admin

    All of NY seemed to be inside a cloud today. Droplets hung in the air, so I wasn’t so much rained on as rained into as I walked to the park. The top of the towers on Central Park South were hidden in fog. I saw an umbrella, then a second and a third, but still most people, like me, were ignoring the weather. The forecast, after all, was for a chance of showers. With any luck, I thought, it will clear, and, if not, I still will have gotten out of the house for a while. And in the back of my mind I thought that harps and dulcimers don’t do well in the rain, so center stage may at last be mine today. And so it was.

    The choir was at it in the tunnel. Rainy days are good for them because people flock to the tunnel for shelter. At the far end of the fountain a man was hitting a stick against a wooden block. Was this another busker? Having never seen him before, I decided not and set up. Within minutes a school group came by. “Does this group have time for a hula?”

    “They’re middle-schoolers,” said a teacher. “Good luck getting them to do anything.”

    With a little cajoling, a group of three donned leis and made a mess of it. “Wait a minute,” I addressed the teacher. “You can hula, can’t you? You’ve got to show them.” I put a lei around her neck and we started again. She showed them all right, with all the right moves. The kids squealed and more of them rushed forward to put on a lei and dance. By the end, we’d done three verses and 7-8 kids had danced. “Where are we going?” I shouted. “To the Hukilau,” came the response.

    Gathering up the leis and spreading them out for the next dancers, I saw that somebody or bodies had dropped a quarter and a penny in my case. The knock-knock of the wooden block was audible behind me. For the next two songs, “Ukulele Lady,” and “Honolulu Eyes,” I tried to ignore it, but it was just too annoying. I’d got my time on center stage, but it was a hollow victory. I could feel the aloha spirit draining from me, so I packed up and moved to my spot on the path, which had the advantage of being under a tree, out of the rain, and out of earshot of the block-knocker.

    Very few people walked by; I was pretty much alone. I took the opportunity to practice a new song, “Down among the Sheltering Palms,” playing it over and over, working through the chord changes. It’s been said that you have to play a song 10,000 times before you know it, so I still have a long way to go. After an hour, with 26 cents to show for it, I packed up and went home. Going out on a day like today maybe wasn’t such a good idea after all.

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