Beggars and Buskers, Musicians and Thieves, Part IV

I'm running late, as usual, and am trying to find my way out of Union Square Station. I see a handy exit sign and am headed toward it when I hear a familiar-sounding song with acoustic guitar accompaniment echoing through the station. It's a young man's voice, a soft tenor, and it's pleasantly rough. I stop and listen. After a few seconds, I realize where I've heard it before. It's Dorian Spencer.

My wife discovered Dorian Spencer one day as she was fighting the crowds in Times Square. He was in the main performance area, near a colorful mural, and his simple rhythms and soft voice caught her attention. She stopped to listen for a while, and continued to stop whenever Dorian was in the station. She finally bought his album, which she played for me.

He's on another platform, so I can't easily reach him, but the acoustics are nice in that part of the station, so I lean against the wall and listen to him finish his set. When he's done, I leave and catch up with my wife.

"I heard your boy," I tell her.
"Dorian Spencer?"
"Yup."
She smiles, "In the subway, where he's meant to be heard."

Here's a video of Dorian. It's not bad, but it's no subway performance!



Dorian's one of the best, but he's not the only good musician on the subway. There are bluegrass bands, R&B acts, an awesome Japanese rock band, steel drummers, sitar players, jug bands, jazz groups, dulcimer players, a barbershop quartet, gospel singers, flutists, pianists, opera singers, saxophonists, bongo performers, and a lady who plays a saw. Some are incredible and some are bizarre. One act, titled "Latin American Cultural Attraction" featured a grizzled old guy with a white beard and a keyboard playing music for a bunch of dancing mechanical dolls. It was one of the stranger, more surreal things I've ever seen, and the effect was augmented by the keyboardists intensely serious fingering and soulful swaying. Clearly, he felt that he was pouring his heart out in Times Square, and the bouncing dollies were helping him drive the message home.

The best performers usually play in Times Square, Penn Station, Union Square, and the other major stations, where they have to try out before they can perform. The organization that runs this program is "Music Under New York," and it has been licensing buskers since 1985. According to its website, it currently features over 100 musical acts that perform 150 shows per week in 25 venues. Here's their webpage, which lists the incredible array of artists that they feature, along with performance sites and schedules.

This isn't to say that all the subway musicians are in league with "The Man." For a rougher sound and a more outlaw thrill, there are the quasi-legal buskers who ply their trade on the crowded subway platforms. At Times Square, there is a Japanese guy who plays a child's electric saxophone. He only seems to know "Edelweiss," but he plays it with charm and beauty.

This summer, there were a lot of steel drummers on the four line, and some of them were really good. Others could only play a few songs. One, in particular, offered his renditions of "Over the Rainbow," "God Bless America," and "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" in endless, overlapping repetition. In his hands, the three songs sounded remarkably similar.

One day, in the long tunnel between Bryant Park and the 7 line, I heard a bagpiper. I love bagpipes and, having visited Scotland a few times, I have some incredible memories with bagpipers on the soundtrack. That having been said, bagpipes in a narrow, tile-lined tunnel are downright sadistic, and my ears were ringing for most of the evening.

My wife has made a study of the subway musicians and has rated them on a variety of scales, but I'm an uneducated observer. I like most of them, even the talentless guy in Grand Central who dresses like Michael Jackson but resembles Little Richard. He can't sing and he can't dance, but he looks fabulous in a gold-sequined jacket and white glove. I even gave him a quarter one day, just because he (literally) lit up my life for a few seconds.

A Little Face Time

By the time I got to New York on the Friday before Spring Break, I was exhausted. Several hours of flying, not to mention cooling my heels in Atlanta when Delta randomly decided to cancel my connecting flight, had left me cranky and fried. Consequently, I didn't really catch on when the wife mentioned that we would be meeting one of my favorite bloggers, Odat, for lunch the following Tuesday. Sometime the next day, as I was wandering from grocery store to grocery store picking up the necessities, it occurred to me that I would finally be meeting one of the people that I regularly welcome into my life. Of course, I immediately got a little nervous. Sure, Odat seemed really cool, and the calming optimism of her posts had been cheering me up for months now, but there was always the possibility...

After all, how many stories have we all heard about psychopaths stalking people on the internet? And, for that matter, don't the neighbors always say the nicest things about serial killers? I mean, can't you imagine someone in Dahmer's building saying, "He was always so optimistic, willing to look on the bright side of things. Of course, he usually had a young swinger sitting on ice in his bathroom, so who can blame him?"

Actually, to be honest, I was never really worried about Odat. I was, however, a little bit nervous about myself. Had I set the bar a little high? Was she aware that I usually draft my posts before I send them out? Jesus, I hoped she'd be as cool in person as she was in her writing.

That's the key point, I guess. A few times a week, I invite a bunch of strangers into my life and take a little peek inside theirs. Maybe I leave out some information, but I write some incredibly intimate things about myself. My favorite bloggers, of course, do the same. We let each other into our thoughts and dare to divulge how our minds work. Admittedly, I'm an exhibitionist, but still...

At any rate, Tuesday came around, by which time I'd managed to put a lid on my nervousness. The wife was feeling pretty sick with a bug that she'd picked up from Georgia. I offered to go alone or reschedule, but she was having none of it. She was eager to meet the legendary Odat, and nothing short of leprosy was going to keep her from this lunch date.

By the time we showed up at Barnes and Noble in Union Square, where we were scheduled to meet Odat, I really had to go to the bathroom. That particular B&N hides their Men's room in a really inconvenient place, which meant that any further nervousness was overshadowed by a frantic search for the porcelain playroom, which I finally located in the computer section. I rejoined the wife by the front door, where she was on the lookout for "a curly redhead." Shortly after I got downstairs, we found ourselves joined by an energetic redhead with a huge smile.

Odat took us to Republic, a fusion restaurant near the bookstore. It had a really spare communal setup that made me think of state-run dining halls in China. The food was fantastic, Thai accented and perfectly prepared. We took off our coats, then put them back on again--it was a beautiful restaurant, but the heat left something to be desired. Somehow, though, the chilly air added to the cozyness of the situation.

Because she was sick, Misanthropster's voice wasn't working too well. When I'm nervous, or forced to carry a lot of the conversation, I tend to get a little Joe Friday. I ask a lot of questions, and probably talk more than I should. Odat was incredibly nice about everything, and I realized that the sensitivity and generosity that pervade her posts have a real basis in her personality. She is, simply, a genuinely kind and thoughtful person.

Lunch ended too soon, and Odat went back to work, while the wife and I trekked back home, where she took a nap. I was only moderately afraid that I had talked too much, and was left feeling pretty amazing about my first blog author meeting.

Which brings me to my next announcement. I'm going up to Arlington, Virginia this weekend to spend Easter with my friend John. He has assured me that he is very much up for a little bar hopping. If any of my favorite DC-area bloggers are available on Saturday or Sunday, please let me know. Having met one of my favorite authors, I'm eager to share beers with a few of the others!