Monday, October 3, 2011

Cougar Bait

I recently tried my hand at a life long dream of mine to street perform on the sidewalk of a busy city with a good friend of mine. Me and Zack set out with the highest of ambitions as we made our journey across the streets of Honolulu to find the most bustling corner of the city. Honestly I don't know what Zack was thinking but I was honestly thinking we'd make at least $100 possibly $200. I'm mean the whole way there we were locating restaurants we were gonna eat at afterwards. Zack was even left his wallet at home having faith that we'd make at least enough money to catch the bus home. Maybe I should've too. After a long walk we finally set up in front of the duke statue in Waikiki with literally hundreds probably thousands of people walking by. After a few songs a couple of attractive young ladies approached us half way through a song. Our first fans! As they came closer they casually continued to walk straight past us and cuttingly remarked that we needed to “start playing already”. I'm not gonna lie that was a kick to the balls. After that I continued to play, maybe more out of spite than anything. We changed our strategy a little and pulled out the slide guitar which made a solid dollar or two, one of which started blowing away down the street. I still kept playing as I watched Zack chased a dollar bill down the street. After about an hour we'd made about three dollars and 5 cents, but then a homeless lady came up midway through a song and asked us if we had a dollar to spare. What could we do, but tell the lady to take her pick out of the two dollar bills that lay in my case. This is not a complaint, like we were both extremely happy to help that old lady, but seriously who comes up to a street performer and asks them for money. Finally we took our $2.05 and made our way to the bus stop. Determined not to let the night discourage me I pulled out my guitar as we waited for the bus to come. Within a few seconds there were a couple of peeps who were quite impressed with out music and came over to listen. One happy middle aged lady came over and repositioned herself right next to Zack. When we'd finished the song all she did was smile and kept repeating that we were “cougar bait”. She then went on to ask us if we knew what cougar bait meant and started stroking Zack's hair while pulling out a beer coloured beverage disguised in a mineral water bottle. After a small amount of dialogue we switched instruments and Zack started busting out an impromptu worship slash prayer song for the people at the bus stop. If nothing else that night, we at least got to give a dollar to a homeless lady and pray for a promiscuous mid-aged alcoholic.

1 comment:

  1. haha. this story is great. so so good. keep em coming shane.

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