The Show...doesn't always go on

So a gig that was supposed to happen tonight did not happen...for whatever reason. It was going to be a fun one with my collective of songwriter buddies, but there will be others and this kind of thing has happened before. When you are dealing with a venue and often a booking person completely separate of the venue, wires are bound to get crossed every once in a while. I've seen it happen at every level of performance, from coffee houses to 5000 seat venues. So while my friend Miguel and I hung out, waiting to see if the gig was going to occur...something cool happened. Miguel pulled out his guitar on the sidewalk along 6th Street and set up his case and started playing. I took my guitar out and jammed along with some lead. In about a half an hour we had $5 in the case which...as Miguel pointed out...if you find the right bar, is 2 beers each. Nice. I had never busked on 6th Street until tonight. There's a weird mixture of people down there...the typical college crowd, some clearly underagers who are either just there for the atmosphere or sporting some seriously fake IDs, lots of panhandlers and homeless, and the tourist families who are clearly wandering around after dinner wanting to see this "Weird Thing" Austin has going on. A couple of people took pictures of us from their cars while stopped at the light. Hopefully we'll end up in a few "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" slide shows. We were part of that "Authentic Austin" for a while tonight...so even though the gig never moved into the bar, we made our mark on 6th Street anyway.