Only in New York
Picture if you will, in the long mezzanine concourse at the 8th Avenue terminus of the L where it crosses with the A, C, and E, a street musician. Work boots, gray-black jeans, a faded flannel shirt, a black leather vest with a Harley-Davidson-ish eagle embossed in the back, a straw cowboy hat with a bicycle head light and tail light strapped around the base of the crown. Smelling of that have-not-showered-in-days tang of the homeless. Playing some truly intense piece from the late Romantic or perhaps later than that (to my chagrin I could not place the composer) on an electronic keyboard in "piano" setting, and playing it well. He looked like a scuffed up Lee Scoresby, thick mustache and all. I started to take out my phone, when he quietly said, "No video." So I put the thing away. I put a dollar in his blue backpack lying open to one side. There were lots of dollar bills in there, but people did not stay long to listen the way folks usually do when someone is pretty good.
But who is going to believe me?
But who is going to believe me?