An Impromptu Performance
As I was getting the subway back from the screening of Daria Martin’s film at the Tribecca Grand Hotel tonight, I saw an impromptu performance on the train. Two men got on at East Braodway, one stop from Brooklyn. I didn’t notice either of them until the one at the other end of the carriage started playing the cello. Then I started to look at the man sitting in front of me – he was sideways on so I could gaze at his profile without being too obvious. He was somewhere between forty and fifty years old and homeless. Just like everything else in New York, he could have been cast and styled by a film crew. He wore a plaid shirt, heavy trousers and boots with no socks on. His feet were tapping away in time to the music.
That’s when I realised that the two men were a double act. The guy on the cello sat at one end of the train, while his partner sat at the other, and when the cellist had finished playing they would both ask the other passengers for a donation.
By this time we had made a stop in York Station, and carried on again. Pretty impressive for a couple of homeless buskers, I thought. Not only have they managed to find a cello, but they’re also really treating us to a proper performance. OK, so it had none of the virtuosity of Zeena Parkins, the experimental musician who had performed on the electric harp back in the Tribeca Hotel. But inbetween the clattering of the subway train and the rasp of the driver’s anouncements, I could tell that that cellist could really play. I looked round at my fellow passengers to see if anyone else was having the same thoughts. A woman who was up near the musician had taken out her purse, so I surreptitiously fumbled in my handbag too, praying that I could remember where I’d stashed all those $1 notes and not pull out a $20 by mistake.
We pulled into the next station, and I saw the homeless man by me begin to stand up, so I closed my hand over the note ready to give it to him. He turned round and got off the train. The cellist was at the other end of the carriage, cap in hand, receiving fistfulls of change from a grateful audience. The homeless man strode purposefully towards the exit.
I realised suddenly that they were not a double act at all. The cellist was just a cellist (and now, as he came closer, I could see he was actually quite smartly dressed), and the homeless man was just another one of us riding the subway, with somewhere to go. I had witnessed an impromptu performance, but my preconceptions had transformed it into something else entirely. The cellist walked towards me and got off at the doors in front of my seat. Embarrased by the force of my own preconceptions, and shaken by the realisation that this man wasn’t homeless, I kept my hand in my pocket and never gave him any money.
Mary
