Hey it’s fast approaching Christmas with it’s vast array of musical opportunities. Wherever I go I bring my Feadog Pro/White Cap combo and I enjoy playing it anytime…anywhere. City streets, stores you name it. I especially enjoy playing it for children. They seem to love it. Overall most ages of people seem to enjoy my playing. My family hates it. They seem to think that I am retarded…mentally challenged. I just enjoy the heck out of it…making beautiful music and creating instant smiles. Besides that it’s easier than carrying a tenor sax around. What do you think?
Merry Christmas. Create smiles.
It’s hard to disagree with that. 
“Musically Talented or Mentally Unbalanced” - not mutually exclusive.
Kevin Krell
I’m with you Elmore-- bringing live, spontaneous music to places where it’s least expected is a real joy. People really do love it, as long as you don’t do it in places where it would be obtrusive (eg in a movie theatre 
)
The only thing for you to do is teach your family to play so they can see what it’s all about.
It is a natural right and privilege of middle-age to be able to embarrass your children in public. What goes around, comes around.
the cashiers at my local grocery store have come to expect a harmonica song during my checkout or while i am waiting for my neighbor to finish his shopping. i’ve not played the whistle inside the grocery store but i have played it with the salvation army bell ringers outside the store.
i also can’t help but think that we’re helping folks.
no, you are not mentally unbalanced, i do the same thing and i’m sane. nevermind all those medications i’m prescribed that stabilize things.
Seeing and listening to musicians playing publicly has always been an encouragement to me.
Truer words have never been written, Kevin. There was a wonderful article in the Washington Post last weekend on Brian Wilson. What a tortured genius. He was mostly washed up at the age of 23 due to a mixture of drug abuse and mental illness. He’s finally gotten his shit together in the last 5-10 years. His story brings two things to mind:
It sucks when someone touches so many lives but can’t enjoy it.
You gotta wonder what the world would have been like had Brian been able to keep it together. It might have been the Beach Boys who were “more popular than God.”
Even more than the Beatles?
it was a close race until Brian folded…
I think it’s so cool that you play in public like that. I have the same set up, a Hoover White Cap on a nickel Feadog body, it looks great and plays well. Keep it up and have fun!
I owe the folks down at the JACK’S hamburger restaurant a tune or two on my tenor sax. No I didn’t trade food for music but that sounds like a good idea. Maybe the sushi bars are up to that. At Jack’s they go wild and start dancing when I play the whistle. I serenaded Mack Hoover with my sax, flute and whistle tonight but I don’t think he cooks. Maybe he’ll cook me up a White Cap to fit my “C” whistle bodies.
You might have your white cap on backwards…mine looks well and plays great!
Do you cook? Send sandwiches and I’ll call. heh heh
That’s what I love about whistles. You can stow one hidden somewhere and whip it out any time. We had our office December birthday lunch the other day. I whipped out my Bb and played Happy Birthday. I hate singing it.
You aren’t mentally unbalanced. Either that, or we all are. I’m not even any good at this and I play in the park or at the beach all the time. I even gave some consideration to creating a whistle quiver for my scooter (I ride a Vespa to work each day) so I can play at long traffic signals. Then I remembered I wear gloves when I ride so that won’t work. Too bad.
Mmmmmm… improperly attributed quote. Ahhh, much better now.
Kevin Krell
The quote was ‘More popular than Jesus’ not ‘More popular than God’.
The exact wording of the controversial quotation by John Lennon on 4th March 1966 was this;
“Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink, I don’t know what will go first, rock ‘n’ roll or Christianity. We’re more popular than Jesus now. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
Brian Wilson is a musical genius.
“God” does seem rather unduly popular in the USA just now, especially judging by some of the recent threads here on church music!
Let’s just leave that one as an observation and let the fighting continue in the rubber room.
About the joy of unexpected and spontaneous music-making, I work at “the happiest place on Earth” where we have an area called “adventureland” that has a shop which sells various African and Polynesian etc things, including ukeleles. Image my suprise when I walked by this shop one day and the guy working there was playing one of these ukes and singing in Hawaiian! He was quite good. Turns out he’s Hawaiian and by chance happened to be working in that shop that day. That was, as they say, priceless.
(This shop also used to sell bamboo whistles from India. I tried all of them and bought the best one, which plays great, in the key of B.)
I play in a Scottish pipe band and recently we’ve done a couple evenings where we go from bar to bar. We just march into a bar and the place goes wild. One guy passes around a tip jar while we play for around ten minutes, and then we go to the next place. It’s tremendous fun for us and 99% of the people in the bars love it. (You always will have the one guy trying to talk on his mobile phone who hates it.)
One of the main guiding principals of my life.