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I'll give money to people on the street if they are doing something. Plastic bucket drummers, mimes, dancers, sax players, singers -- do SOMETHING and I'll do something in return. Be part of the city, not just a leech!

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We don't have too many of those. Used to have one fella -- guess he was maybe middle aged at the time -- played a sax for whatever you could spare. He was good too. Don't know why he couldn't make it as a professional musician, or maybe he did, and lost it all. I used to make requests...or sometimes he'd see me coming and start playing something he remembered I liked. Haven't seen him for a long time...wonder what happened to him.

Reader's Digest had a great story years ago about some crazy guy in New York who used to carry a big white plaster bucket around, sit himself down in a subway car, and stare blankly into space for a while and talk to himself as the other passengers sat uncomfortably in the seats around him. Suddenly he would turn the bucket upside down, whip out a pair of drum sticks from his ragged jacket, and start banging on the upside-down bucket. The author of the story -- who may have been a percussion instructor at Juilliard or another exclusive school like that -- swore that he had never heard anyone play a drum as well as that guy.

I once gave $20 to a Jamaican guy in New York City who played kettle drums in Times Square. At first I thought he was just plain "good," but I was amazed to see that he could play any tune that any random passerby requested. It's one thing to hear someone like that play "Yankee Doodle Dandee" or "Mary Had a Little Lamb" -- those folks are a dime a dozen -- but there must have been several hundred people gathered around him when people realized that this guy could play requests that included the theme song from "Raiders of the Lost Ark," Rossini's "William Tell Overture," "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" by Iron Butterfly, and a number of scores from Bach's "Brandenburg Concerto."