While walking home today, I was drawn to the sound of music playing on Broadway. To my surprise, I found that a three-piece band was playing an impromptu concert in the Diamond parking lot next to the old U.S. Bank building. They had a generator to power their (quite loud) amps, and two guys stood across the parking lot, one with a hand-held DV cam, and one with a 35mm still camera. They were taking up the handicapped space and the one next to it, though they did not seem to be physically disabled.
I settled down and began munching on my burger from Dick’s. There was a small group of people sitting down and watching the show; a girl with some packages she’d picked up from the post office, a guy on a bike, and a few other people. Around a half dozen in all.
I figured it wouldn’t be long before an authority figure arrived to shut things down, and I wasn’t disappointed. Two songs in, I saw a police cruiser pull into the second half of the lot. He waited until they were done with the song, then gave them a stern talking-to. He seemed not so much to mind that they were playing, but with the sheer volume of the performance. And it was, indeed, quite loud.
After being told to disperse, I walked up to the teenage band members to find out something about them. It seems that they are called The Rivals, and they are from California. This only raised more questions. Why drive two states to play in a parking lot? Who, exactly, are they rivals of? Did they pay for their parking space?
There were no clear answers.
“Here,” I said, as I dropped five bucks into their open guitar case, “for your bail.”
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