Metro Musicians

Every day on my way to class I take the metro. It's great fun, especially when there are so many people that you end up spooning complete strangers. It's not awkward at all.

Okay, I lied there. It is quite awkward at times. ESPECIALLY when you somehow end up face to face with somebody. You just can't make eye contact with somebody when your face is only 3 inches away from theirs. Unless they're you're husband/fianceé/boyfriend. But I don't have one of those. But I do have Tim. Remember that one time at Rumors, Tim? Or was that Sam? Maybe both? I bet they don't even read this.

Back to the point of this post: every day I take the metro, and every day I hear Metro Musicians performing their hearts out for a few euros.

There's this one guy who plays a drum. He just sits there and plays his djembe every day. I like him. He adds a little rhythm to my step each morning. I wonder if he has any other talents?

There's this other guy that plays a synthesizer keyboard. Every day he plays the same song, except now that Christmas is near he plays various Christmas carols. The synthesizer makes sounds quite strange, and he always smiles. I like him, too, even though I don't particularly care for his synthesizer.

Some days, the guy with the drum and the guy with the synthesizer play together. That's always fun. They kind of look alike. I wonder if they're related?

This one guy has a little CD player that he plugs into a little amp and sings along to the CD into a microphone. He doesn't sing very well at all, but when he smiles, he makes me feel happy. But most of the time he just looks bored. He looks like he's about 40-45 years old.

But the best of all time...and this one wasn't at the metro I take to school - it was a different station - was this girl singing "My Heart Will Go On" by Celine Dion. You know, the Titanic theme song? Yeah, we all remember it a little too well. As most of them do, she sang along to a track (but this one didn't have words as opposed to the guy with the CD player) with a microphone and amp. While she sang, she sat on a little chair with her legs crossed and the microphone held limply in her hand. She looked incredibly bored and even in the most dramatic moments of the song, she was checking out her fingernails or something like that. An hour or two later, when I returned from where I was going, she was still there, singing the exact same song, looking as excited as ever (that was sarcasm there, if you didn't catch that). I wish you could have seen it. I'm too tired right now to describe it in a way that would do it justice.

Some days I think I would like to be one of these Metro Musicians. I would love to have a microphone and an amp and a track to some 80's and 90's pop hits. But I wouldn't sit. I would stand. And I wouldn't look bored, either. I'd be super enthusiastic and people walking by wouldn't be able to keep from tapping their feet, nodding their heads to the beat and singing along. It would be fabulous.

Can you picture it? Some day I would love to do this, I just don't know that I would have the guts. Is it illegal? Would I have to pick up my amp and run away when I saw the police? Would I have to find a power outlet to plug it in? And would I have to fight the dude with the synthesizer for said power outlet? Could we sing together? I don't like to sing by myself, not really. It takes a bit of warming up to the people around me for me to sing solo.

If anybody still reads this, what songs do you think I should sing? What would be a big hit that would get me discovered? What song might earn me more than 5 Euro a day (keeping in mind that most people only put about 20 cents into your cup at a time)?

sidenote: Panda says that nobody reads my blog anymore (except Julie!) because I went so long without updating (a whole 3 weeks! wow!) while I didn't have internet. If that's the case, I'M BACK! So tell your friends!

-LB