More People Outside Than In

There were more people out on the street that runs along the ocean than there were inside at the jazz club -- only 25 or 30 of us that Easter Sunday afternoon.

And, of that number, only one crazy one. But this time (ha!) he went for Richie and not me, hurray!

All of the club musicians know that they've got a good shot at performing at these events so a lot of them show up. Yesterday we had a plethora of pianists, three of them, in fact. Two of them are perfectly sane, the third is as crazy as betting a NASCAR race.

It's the same dude that approached me last month with his "drawings." You may recall "A Field of Snow" which was a blank, white space with a frame, of sorts, drawn around it. For a man of his age, probably mid-50s, one might be forgiven for thinking that the artist was perhaps not giving us his very best...

He is short, about 5 ft. 4 in. with a girth that has to be easily 5 ft. 8 in. A small man to begin with, today his feet, in faded-looking canvas slippers, look as tiny as a four year old's. He cannot button his much-washed khaki pants, so he uses a sturdy-looking leather belt to hold them up. He was wearing a grey-ish white t-shirt with a peach-colored short -sleeved dress shirt over it, unbuttoned. It trailed behind him like a sail as he moved about the room.

This time, he sidled up to Richie and began telling him the story of Moses! On Easter Sunday!

More unnervingly, he does not walk up to a person, say "Hello," or, in fact make any sort of conversational gambit (as more normal people do) as a preface to whatever he wants to talk about.

"There was this river, see, and this woman put a basket in it and stood, watching the basket drift away and ..." A few sentences later - he'd gotten to another woman pulling the basket out of the river -- the band started up with a howl of cornet and thunder of drums. He looked at the band, clearly offended at being interrupted, and drifted away in disgust, shirt tails billowing out behind him like the wake of an ocean liner. He never came back to our table and for that, I can only be profoundly grateful.

Next month's event will feature Jazz America, a group of high school students, who are learning this kind of music (Dixieland) and who perform it very well indeed. The second Sunday in May for your calendar. But I would remind you that we've already heard most of the story of Moses...