Sleep All Day, Rock All Night...

"...the Law come and get you if you don't walk right.." -Jerry Garcia, from "Tennessee Jed," by The Grateful Dead
35 Dollar Friday
Caleb The Almost Amish Guy

Last night, I didn't start until about a quarter til midnight, and made the above amount, but twenty of it came from an old friend whom I haven't seen in about 8 years, Ben Jernigan from Mobile, Alabama.
Ben is jamming with some pretty heavyweight musicians, now, like Phil Lesh, formerly of The Grateful Dead.
We are Facebook friends, and I have seen, over the past years, stuff that he has put up, such as him jamming with Phil and Friends.
Caleb
Then, I encountered a small bearded young man who was carrying a guitar and said that he had just arrived in the French Quarter for the first time in his life about an hour before then.
He had set up on Bourbon Street, towards the crazy end and had been promptly dispatched by the police, and informed about the 8 PM "curfew" on street performing.
He was basically asking me "How does this work?"
I told him that we are supposed (holding my fingers up to make quotation marks) to be playing on Royal Street.
I was reminded how lucky I am that Lilly took the time to consult the Quality of Life committee, and had held a neighborhood meeting and had talked to the cops, all on my behalf.
Caleb, as that is his name, said that he had tried Royal Street and found it to be "pretty dead."
I told him that there are different kinds of "dead" and that the few tourists he did see on Royal were on their way to 3 hundred dollar per night lodgings, and that I knew people who made money off them between midnight and 4 AM.

After I told him where I played, he said something like "So, the nine hundred block is..." as if he was considering going there himself.
Initially this made me defensive, and I began to explain how it was kind of "my" spot and about Lilly and...everything.

But, not before posting up a few random pics out of my folder of them...

Then, it dawned upon me to flip the script and I actually told him about the Lilly Pad and told him that I would contact Lilly and tell her that I had met a guy (him) who turned out to be a nice guy, and that I told him that he could play at the spot, but just turn it over to me if and when I ever show up.

Caleb was all for this, and, within an hour of arriving in New Orleans had himself a spot that took me 2 years to secure.

It was a win-win situation.

Then I got home and worked on music for 12 hours, slept, discovered that my new food card had arrived in the mail, six days into the "seven to ten" days promised, and so, now it is once again time to fold up this laptop and go out and busk...