Get Back, Get Back...

This afternoon I returned to Broadview and Danforth, and tried to create my own little folk festival in the subway vestibule.

This time, the lights on me were under construction.

Midway through my hour and a half-long stay, a group of maintenance workers set up a big yellow ladder at the edge of my performance space and fiddled with wiring overhead.

"Don't stop playing!", one of them said.

It was fine. I had to tune anyway, so I took a short break.

As I've mentioned before, Broadview subway station is perpetually under construction. Just when I think it might clear up, an ambitious new phase of the project seems to get underway. The man on the ladder today was working on the elevator installation, but there's more going on than just that. (Maybe I should suggest a stage and professional sound system?)

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Although donations at Broadview are generally low, likely because the acoustics are poor and the traffic flow is less-than-advantageous, this afternoon still yielded miracles.

Among them was a Sri Lankan man who told me he's a singer, planning to buy a guitar.

When I asked about his family, he told me that he had lost 60 relatives in the tsunami disaster. The courage and openness in his expression inspired me to say yes when he asked if I could teach him a few guitar basics, and to play "Distant Shore" for him, a song I wrote on December 28th.

I appreciated the two musicians who stopped--both the one who bought a CD and the other who had no money on him. We all had mutual friends. Somehow in the noise and rush, communities of like-minded people seem to find each other. (This is true no matter what, but I guess I'm helping it along by singing out loudly in a public space.)

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By the time I needed to go home, I'd earned $33.90, which included the price of one CD and a subway token. (The woman who gave it to me was particularly sweet, smiling and asking "Do you know what this is"? Of course I do. It's $2.50!)

As I was packing up, I saw for the first time a discarded Metro newspaper that had been lying less than a foot away from me, probably the whole time. It was open face-up to a story about the Juno Awards nominations which were announced yesterday.

Funny that I didn't even notice.