Words, Images and Music

When I got to the 34th street subway station I heard a voice saying “Saw Lady”. I looked around and saw two ladies talking but it didn’t look like it was them calling my name.
I kept walking and I heard the voice again. I looked around.
From a dark corner a homeless man with a full shopping cart was waving to me.

Photographer: © Rod Goodman (from his Buskers Project)

Bo, Romero and the 3rd acapella singer came to say ‘hi’. We all agreed it was slow today. “Tomorrow will be slower”, they said, because of the big U.N. meeting.
They told me that Chill, the other man who sings on the trains with them, is home suffering from lung desease. He has to use an oxygen tank. He is going crazy because he can’t come out and sing in the subway. “He sings along with every TV commercial because he misses singing so much”, they told me. He hopes to get a portable oxygen tank so he could come out and just hang with the acapella singers as they walk the trains.

A Hassid wanted to buy my CD. He asked me repeatedly if there are any lyrics on the recording: “No words?”. I didn’t know if ‘no words’ on the CD is a good or a bad thing for him, but I told him that there are no words in the music on my CD. It’s completely instrumental.
He asked me how long the CD is. I told him don’t know, but there are 12 tracks – some are two minutes long, some are 6 minutes long, some are in between.
He bought the CD and immediately opened it and threw the front insert into my donations bucket.
“You don’t want the insert?”, I asked. I have never met anybody who didn’t want the insert before.
He explained that it’s because there is a picture of a woman on the insert (me). The same picture is also on the disk. He needed to cover it. He asked if I have a sticker. I peeled a sticker off from my amp (which was there from the time I had my amp fixed) and he put it on my image on the CD.
Now he said he can use the CD.
The strange thing was that the Hassidic gentleman was worried about words in the music and about the image of a woman on the CD – but he still bought the CD even though it’s a Christmas CD!