The Father Orb

I hustled out of my apartment around 4:00 today to try cramming in a few hours of busking before hustling off again to run box office for Laughing Liberally midtown. I'm heading home to NC tomorrow for T-giving, and am in dire need of money for the journey (I inevitably spend much more than I should when I'm with my friends back home...the guilt usually hits me about a week later when I question how badly I needed those RC Colas and honey sticks). Tonight wasn't bad, and should at least pay for my cab ride to LaGuardia tomorrow.

Throughout the 10 and a half month existence of this blog, I've written about everything from the perils of busking in the summer to the annoyances of drunken back-up singers. Busking is weird. And not many other people are going to unpack that for you, so it may as well be me. There is one strange nuance of busking that I don't think I've mentioned yet, however.

Tonight, right as a train arrived, a 20-something girl scurried over to my guitar case and dropped in a dollar. I paused in my singing (albeit, at an awkward point in the music) but continued strumming, and thanked her as she began to move toward the train. She bashfully said something to me that I didn't make out at first -- it seemed like maybe she was apologizing for stopping me, or something along those lines. I told her, "no, not at all!" Then about half a second later, as the sardine-can metal doors shut behind her, I realized that she had said, "you really sound good!" Ugh.

When people donate, I -- for some reason -- am reluctant to really stop what I'm doing to thank them for long. Part of the reason for this is that I think it would embarass them. It takes an odd kind of courage to give a busker a buck, and I don't want to call too much attention to someone kind enough to help me out by stopping the song and allowing them to start up a conversation with me. But sometimes people do want that. There have been a few instances in which I could tell that a donor wanted to talk to me about something after they'd plopped their money in. You can just tell; they hover a little. Usually it's in regards to a request or a question about who wrote the song I was playing. And I definitely don't mind talking with people.

It would be ill-advised to stop playing every time someone tosses me a dime only to stand quietly as they walk away from my case. Awkward. It would suck equally to not stop playing and miss out on meeting Scarlett Johanssen in disguise in the New York subway. Alas. No perfect solution. At any rate, consider this entry my apology to the nice young lady who complimented me only to get an incongruent reply.

Oh. Roy Orbison's been on my playlists a lot lately, so I finally attempted to play "Crying" tonight with modest success. It's hard stuff, but about as cathartic as it gets.