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So...hot...and...muggy. Wheeze! Gasp! This is the sort of weather I really dislike...when you step outside and immediately wish you hadn't. When walking the two blocks to the post office is a sweat-inducing activity. When treeless streets become deserts. If the weather forecast includes a warning to check up on elderly relatives it's too hot for me. Again, I'm a little old man just waiting to age. I know, I'm a wimp. But I'd like to live in a perpetual mid-to-late autumn... This evening was going to be miserable - I worked at the concert hall's outdoor stage - but then a torrential rain cooled things off nicely. It turned out to be breezy and comfy for yours truly. The group performing was also lovely. Les Yeux Noirs (Black Eyes) is a French Gypsy group...I think. The house manager didn't quite know, and the group brought no printed material. It would have been in French anyhow, a language in which I am hopeless. But whatever their heritage the music was quite fun and I got to sit in the concessions tent selling CDs and t-shirts. As I did this I came to the conclusion that I'd either enjoy or hate owning a little shop of some kind...probably a bookstore. I'd enjoy getting everything just so and setting out displays of books and such. I'd hate it when people came in and messed things up, primarily by buying something. I can't count how many times I re-stacked the CDs in the artful swoop I'd arranged. Anal. Fussy. This is me. The funny bit is that when I first set up I discovered that whoever sold the merchandise for the noon show miscounted or lost a CD and a t-shirt. We were short either those items or thirty-five dollars...neither sounded fun to moi. I alerted the house manager, an impeccably honest man who set himself to tracking down where and how this mistake was made. By the time the show was over and the band came to collect their money and leftover stuff, he had made no progress...so he bluffed. "Well, this is how much money," he cheerfully chirped. "That sound right?" I think he was hoping that these men would just shrug with Gallic indifference and take the cash. No such luck. Last I saw the house manager he was talking very fast, making up numbers and calculations and such, in what I can only assume was an attempt to befuddle the band's one dodgy English speaker into giving up and going home. I doubt it worked. |
