So we left off not knowing how the hell we were going to make some cash to get back to NYC. There were a lot of good ideas that were popping into my brain. Now good ideas don't always translate into good in reality. Case and point: I thought it would be cool to try and be a bathroom attendant in a restaurant. You know the guys who put soap in your hand and give you towels and gum after you do your business in a nicer restaurant? Yea they make some money in tips right? Well they might, but I never got my hands dirty enough to find out, because as soon as an employee saw what I was doing in their restaurant, they didn't think it was as good of an idea and I thought. They asked me to leave.
So then our next plan was maybe a bake sale. Everyone loves bake sales. One problem though. We don't have an oven and/or time to bake things. Thank the good man above for Safeway. We bought up some cookies and donuts for dirt cheap (thank you newly owned Safeway card), and headed down near all the museums and monuments on the D.C. Mall. There are a lot of people there right? Right.
Along our way there, Christina and I walked past a fine fellow sitting in a doorway with a couple of guitars on either side of him. This man looked homeless, and perhaps was a user of a few recreational drugs. The reason we stopped was because he yelled out "Hey! You have a guitar! I have two guitars! Let's play!" I can never turn down a fellow musician. He was nice, and even had a chair for me to sit in. He gave me one of his guitars and told me to play, except the guitar was so out of tune it sounded like cats fighting, yet he somehow thought it was great (the drugs talking). I asked him his name and he said, confidently, "Jimi Hendrix!" He lives! I couldn't help but begin laughing, and wondering about out safety at this point, so I thought it was time to get rolling. I feared taking a picture with him because he might steal my pinky. As we were packing up and starting to walk away, he yelled at me asking my name. I said Patrick, and he promptly returned with "Patrick? I can remember that! It's my sister's name!" I hope more than anything someday I meet a lady named Patrick Hendrix.
So we headed down to the Mall and set up shop with a sign that said
"Help Us With Our Social Experiment". We were on a bench near an ice cream guy, who seemed to get pissed we were encroaching on his space, because he left about 15 minutes after we got there. We figured this sign was a great way to draw people in, because what the hell is that? I played some guitar, and we sat back and waited. We ran into my old co-worker Mary and her friends Megan who hung out with us for a while. This ended up working to our advantage, as more people make us look less crazy. No more than 5 minutes after starting, this awesome dude Casey walked up and wanted to know what this was all about. We told him, he laughed, pulled out his wallet, and said he would donate, if he can get a photo with the girls, and it gets put on the site. Well played Casey. View it below. You were also the top donor of the day! Casey gave us $10. That, along with the $4 Mary and Megan gave us, put us 35% of the way there, in 5 minutes. We were on a roll.
But then it got a little slow. Awkward looks here, confused glances there. People seemed to be
terribly frightened by our sign and presence. Even if we said hello,
people acted as though they didn't speak English in order to avoid talking with us. Thanks people. But every once in a while, a couple people stopped and asked, and donated a couple bucks. We met a frisbee player, a group of friends from Boston, a guy on a bike that never got off his bike to talk with us, just rode around in circles, and a lady from Denmark here with a 50 person gospel choir. And she made ME sing in front of her. Not cool. I poorly pulled off the first verse and a half of Jeff Buckley's "Alleluia" We even had one little kid who donated a quarter, but did so by running to us from across the lawn, dropping it, and sprinting away. Are we scary looking? All very nice people, and after a change of locations a couple of times, we found ourselves about a dollar short. There was only one thing to do. Get wet.
I found a couple of fountains around D.C. and chose these as the way I will get my last dollar. I got some pretty strange looks from a couple of parents who were holding their kids while they threw coins into the fountain, and I was across from them, grabbing these coins out of the water. I have no shame, friends, and I needed a dollar, and I got it. We hit $40 bucks. Enough to get home. Success! We even had a few extra minutes to sightsee before heading out, so we walked down to the White House and talked with Obama a bit about Health Care. Did you know there are DEATH PANELS?!?! Oh goodness...
We got back to the bus station around 6:15, just in time to catch the 6:30 bus back to NYC. We got back to my apartment around midnight, an 18 hour adventure complete. I was so thankful Christina did it with me. I owe you girlie.
Thanks for reading and following along, and to all the people I met down in D.C. Send in more suggestions and tell your friends. Have a good Monday.
1 comments: