Posts Tagged ‘All You Need Is Love’

  1. Hats and Scarves

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    October 11, 2016 by admin

    It has to be at least 60 degrees for me go out, otherwise I’d have to break character and wear something under my aloha shirt, or something over it. Today was on the cusp. I wore socks and sneakers instead of sandals, long pants instead of short, and what I’d come to call my formal aloha shirt, a lined, 100% rayon number in purple, with white, green and gold fronds and flowers.

    It was a perfect October day, as sweet and cool as a Honeycrisp apple. New mothers dressed up baby in her new fall wardrobe, tourists donned hats and scarves, and at the Imagine Mosaic all you needed was love. There were lots of shiny chestnuts on the ground under the sickly chestnut tree; few, if any, still held on to the denuded upper branches. Squirrels seemed to prefer acorns, which are plentiful.

    I checked in on the wood anemone. Although still covered in buds, no more seemed to have opened; I may have seen the only one to bloom this year.

    In the sun at the fountain, despite intermittent gusts of wind from the north, I was warm, and only got warmer the longer I played. A little kid ran up and tossed a dollar in my case. He ran back to his parents and, a moment later, ran back to me. “Is that a guitar?” He ran to his parents, then back to me a few more times, until I had him strumming a D chord. His parents joined us, pictures all around.

    I got $2 from a couple walking by. “I’m married to a musician,” she explained.

    “I’m sorry,” I said, as if I too were a musician, instead of just playing one in Central Park.

    There were lots of kids in the park. Only later did I remember it was Columbus Day. After taking in a few bucks from a few pre-schoolers, a man who had been sitting nearby at the fountain with his family, dropped a dollar in my case. They were from Israel, and as we talked I learned that his wife and children were sabras, but he was born in Iraq.

    “Where will you break the fast?” I asked them.

    She shrugged. “At a restaurant, I guess.”

    “When is Yom Kippur?” the dad asked me.

    “Is he Jewish?” One of three sons, in his early teens, wanted to know, presumably about me.

    A family from D.C. did the hula for a dollar. Two young Irishmen gave me two. A giggling English girl walked up from the benches with a dollar. She would not hula.

    Lots of people contributed loose change. The gorgeous holiday had brought out big crowds. By the end of my set, people were sitting all around me. The bubble girl had set up to my right; the back massage lady unfolded her chair with its face pillow directly in front of me. I counted out 6 singles and $3.18 in coin. I slipped away and the crowd closed in on where I’d stood, as if I’d never been there.

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  2. After Labor Day

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    September 8, 2016 by admin

    Returning to the park after Labor Day, I found another 2 weeks of drought had taken a toll. Red fuschia and begonia languished in the shade; a small patch of cornflower looked like abused badminton birdies, brown and broken. Amid the dependable roses, fat yellow rose hips formed. The last of the cleome under the dogwood bloomed white, while the great mass of them behind the benches had burned up.

    The crowds were thin. The guitarist sang “All You Need is Love” to a small audience at the Imagine Mosaic. At the road, where, amazingly, bike riders stopped for the light, the spent spikes of Lady’s Mantle were 4 feet high, sedum showed some pink florets and the astilbe, like the cleome, was burned to a crisp.

    I approached the cowboy. “When’s quitting time?”

    “I have no idea.” He looked at his watch and said, “15 minutes.”

    So I moved on, past the portraitists under the maple, to my #3 spot, under the sheltering bush across from the boat rental kiosk, where I sang, for the most part, to myself. At one point a group of 5 young people from the Czech Republic stopped. “I’ll dance the hula if you teach me how,” said a 20-something woman. I did, and off we went to the hukilau. After the dance, I told her of my visit to Prague “before you were born, in 1970.”
    .
    “That’s before my parents were born,” she said. “You have such good memories of my country,” she added. “Now you have given us good memories of yours.” With that, they walked off.

    After 30 minutes, I tossed all my paraphernalia into my case and went back to center stage. By this time, a rock trio had set up near the lake and were shouting lyrics rather than singing them, like a Seattle grunge band. The doo-wop group was making great use of the acoustics in the arcade. Despite the ambient noise, however, I set up again. As long as I played, I couldn’t hear the competition.

    A jolly man and his jolly wife gave me a dollar. The man said my music was making a wonderful day even more so. A lady walked by and tossed a dollar in my case. Two women, who had been sitting on the bench, tapping their feet to my tunes, finally picked up their belongings and made ready to leave. But first they put $2 in my case and chatted about the old songs.

    A bride and groom, with entourage, appeared at the fountain. It was already past quitting time, but I sang out “The Hawaiian Wedding Song” for them, then closed, as usual, with “Little Grass Shack.”

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  3. Mid-Season

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    August 1, 2014 by admin

    The last day in July is another gem. The homeless man is singing “All You Need Is Love” at Strawberry Fields. The chestnut leaves, as expected, are starting to brown from blight. Across the road, past Daniel Webster and the hot dog stand, the pods on the catalpa trees are 18” long. There is the usual commotion up on the mall, where the acrobats whip up the crowd, but all is quiet at Bethesda Fountain. I keep on going; one day a week in the sun is sufficient.

    A couple stopped to chat. He was from Ireland, County Galway; she was from Jersey City. “I’ll give you a dollar if you play something Irish,” he said.

    I faked a couple of bars of “The Harp Which Once Through Tara’s Halls.”

    Satisfied, he reached for his wallet. “We used to sing that in school when we were little kids,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve heard it since.”

    A couple of Portuguese girls stopped to hula. One of them showed me how much she’d learned to play the uke from the internet.

    No sooner had I taken the leis from the Portuguese girls than I heard a cry of delight. “Oh, look, it’s the hula man. Remember me?” asked a dark-haired twenty-something. “From Beirut? I still have the video.” While she searched her backpack for her camera/phone, she made the introductions. “This is my sister and my cousin and her friend from Queens. Let’s hula.” She pressed some buttons then handed the camera off to her cousin’s friend.

    “What did we dance to before?” I asked.

    “Hukihukihuki,” she said, handing out the leis. So this time we danced to “My Little Grass Shack.”

    “I come every year,” she said, while her cousin dropped a fiver. “I see you next year, ok?”

    Aloha to that. A young man told me as he walked by that I was the best yet. I presume he meant best busker and thanked him for the compliment, which was all he had to give. A group of Italians, who did not have time for a hula yesterday, were back today with time to kill. A gay guy in a porkpie hat did a languorous hula for his friends. Add a couple of toddler hulas, and before you can say humahumanukunukuapua’a there was over $16 in my case.

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