A Guy in Need of a Prayer

A homeless lady in a red shirt took the elevator from the train platform to the mezzanine of the Times Square subway station. She told me that she will starve tonight. She passed the morning sitting on the platform with a sign hanging from her neck, hoping for donations, but, she told me that people think that all homeless people use whatever money they get to buy drugs… She stores her seat – a milk cart – by the elevator. I suggested to her that she could try walking the trains. She agreed that one can get better donations on the trains. I wished her luck. She wished me better luck than hers.

Juan was playing the mandolin at the Music Under New York spot when I got there. He told me that he did a few gigs of Andean music together with a Chinese group. I bet the mixed sound of Andean and Chinese music is very interesting.

A guy was talking with his friend on his cell phone and he put the phone by me so that his friend could hear my playing. I asked him where his friend was at. ‘Michigan’, he said.

Another guy videotaped me. He told me he will send this video to a friend of his who is touring with some disco era group. He then told me the guy’s name is Tom and asked me if I could leave Tom a message on his video-phone 🙂

Monique, the nice Barnard College student who filmed me for her first film project came to the Times Square subway station especially in order to give me a copy of her film. So nice of her – THANK YOU, Monique! She told me she finished her summer school at Barnard and now she is going to Florida, because her mother’s job was moved there. Her film was screened at the ‘Fiction and Documentary Film Festival’ of Barnard College last week. Monique said:
“a ton of people in the dorms came up to me and told me how much they loved my documentary”. I’m not surprised – this is a girl who knows what she is doing!

The trumpet player from Bond Street Theater stopped to ask me if I remember his band – they play music while walking on stilts. We did some festival together a while back.

The homeless guy who was looking for a t-shirt the other day walked by wearing a different color t-shirt. “New t-shirt!” I said to him. He threw a coin at my donations box. The stilt walking trumpet player picked it from the floor and put it in my box.

Two Dianetics people, a guy and a girl, wheeled their stuff by, probably on their way to Union Square.

A guy who often walks by at the Times Square subway station and always stops to talk to me asked if I would pray for him. He might need a stomach operation and he is scared because he has high blood pressure and he is diabetic.

The X-pick-pocket-girl came to High Five me and asked if I think she looks fat.

A guy took my card and said that he is a chaplain from NJ. He explained to me that a chaplain is like a priest but non-denominational. He does ceremonies but not in churches.
He told me his 43 year old daughter has a twenty year old daughter…

At about 3:30 Floyd Lee (Delta Blues) asked if I would watch his stuff while he went to get something to eat. I told him I plan to leave at 4pm. I was worried what I would do if 4pm rolled by and Floyd wasn’t back…but he was. He had just played with his band at the ‘River to River’ festival, and had a permit to the Times Square spot for 6pm. I gave him the spot so he could have an extra 2 hours to play. He showed me the fold-out table he uses to display his CDs – he said it was from 1887…
Floyd is going to Moscow, Russia for 4 days in September, to perform.