Friday Night, 32 Bucks

I'm making a point to list the busking amounts I have been coming up with as post titles in order to hold myself accountable.

I could have knocked off at midnight last night, after I had amassed a whopping total of six dollars after almost two hours of playing; but then I would have had to compose a "six dollar Friday" entitled post, and plus I still owed Jacob 35 bucks.

It was that last thing that made me decide to keep playing. I had been prepared to play for 3 hours, thinking that that would give me at least enough exposure to the "numbers game" of it all, and that I should walk away with somewhere around fifty bucks, should I do so.

It was tempting to think that, since I had only made six bucks the first two hours, the money was coming in at that rate and I stood to only make another three bucks by staying another hour.
But, I was playing at just about my highest level and found that all I really had to do was start another song and the next five minutes, at least, would elapse with me on the spot and playing.
Then, along came the dream tourists, Sarah, who looked a lot like Elle Fanning, and her boyfriend, whose name I forget.
This was after a guy had come along who wanted to play my guitar and who I had refused, even though he had said that he had put five bucks in my basket. While he had been sitting there listening, a skeezer came along who kind of "high fived" the guy as he walked past.
He had been telling me in broken English that he busked himself "In every Province of Canada," but I just had an image in my mind of him and the skeezer being in cahoots and him wanting to steal my guitar so he could busk here in New Orleans.
It was probably just my imagination, but, I was thinking of the skeezer who was up the street a ways after having high-fived the guy, as if he was waiting for him to rejoin him. I felt a little bit guilty, but a guy who is visiting from Canada, who has busked all over there, but yet, hadn't carried his guitar along with him on his trip to NOLA cannot reasonably expect to be able to walk up to a busker and play his guitar.
I can't imagine anyone making such a request to the musicians on Royal Street. Something about me sitting on Lilly's stoop must make me look less formal, with an element of "sitting on my front porch picking the guitar just for recreation" to my aspect.

Tangled up...

But then Sarah and her boyfriend stopped and were listening and dancing along to "Nowhere Man," by The Beatles.
Sarah then asked me if I took requests.
I told her that it wasn't likely that I would know most things people request, but...
She asked me if I would play "Tangled Up In Blue," by Bob Dylan.
It crossed my mind that she had perhaps walked past me on a prior night and heard me playing that song, as it is one of less than a dozen that I play in "steady rotation" and had requested it, knowing that I knew it and would be happy that she had asked for it.
So, I did that song, careful to include all of the verses, until I got to the "Montague Street" verse, where I played a harmonica solo and then came out of it and skipped ahead to the verse that includes "So, I drifted down to New Orleans..." which seemed to give them goose-bumps as it hit home that they were in that same fabled city that is mentioned in at least a dozen songs that I can think of.
While Bob was "Lucky enough to be employed, working for a while on a fishing boat outside of Delacroix," I change that line to "Lucky enough to be employed sitting and playing on a milk crate, outside the oldest bar."
Sarah left me a ten dollar bill, after telling me that that was a lot of money for her and that she wouldn't have done it for a musician of less caliber than myself, and that the deal sealer had been my playing her "favorite song."
And the fact that one of the less than 12 songs that I do every night was her favorite was a grand coincidence.
So, I counted 32 dollars when I got home after not even having bought cat food because Harold had left half his last plate unfinished...