I wonder if this is a message not only to consumers, but also to the vehicle itself.
IT took 30 years of playing guitar in Grand Central Terminal and on New York City streets, but Luke Ryan finally landed a corporate sponsor.
Mr. Ryan, 58, usually plays a couple of mornings a week at Grand Central, making him a fixture there, whether commuters notice or not. On Thursday, Mr. Ryan had set up his microphone and speakers in front of where the Times Square shuttles scoot in and out, and there were near constant lines of people heading in both directions. Some people glanced at the source of the sound, some even tugged at their pockets as they passed as though retrieving a dollar, but no one dropped in any change.
“Hey, what happened, everyone looks cranky today. Is it a boyfriend? Is it a girlfriend? Is it the economy?” Mr. Ryan said into his microphone, after finishing a growling version of “Piano Man.” “If you need any help with being poor, ask me. I’ve been doing it forever.”
His leather vest was coming apart at the seams, and his black T-shirt with a skull on it had seen a few wearings. (He says he likes buying Salvation Army T-shirts because they are cheap and weird, like the one he bought that says ‘I was driven wild at David’s bar mitzvah.’) Mr. Ryan was going to have fun that morning, even if his audience was not.
“This is New York. Do not make eye contact with anyone. We’re all thugs and murderers,” Mr. Ryan said to the crowd. That got the attention of a young guy in several layers of sweatshirts and coats, holding onto a baseball cap, who waved and grinned. “Amen!”
And the morning seemed to turn a little more profitable. A woman dropped in a dollar, and a guy chewing on a straw, loping toward the train, doubled back to drop in a coin and give Mr. Ryan an approving fist bump.
“Hundreds and hundreds of people have passed me by for years and never dropped a penny in my case,” Mr. Ryan said in an earlier interview, “but you try not to focus on that, because right after you start thinking about them, someone will come down and drop a dollar in your case when you’re just standing there, scratching your head, because they appreciate what you’re doing.”
His legs set wide, Mr. Ryan leaned back against a railing and began picking his next tune. About an hour into his set, Mr. Ryan’s guitar case held a littering of dollar bills. (He had put some in himself to help the morning along, he said.) He had patched the guitar case with green and black duct tape and had jammed into it a cardboard sign that read “Pimp My Case,” a few of his CDs for sale — and a sign for Unilever, the multibillion-dollar global consumer product giant.
Mr. Ryan had found some commercial work. Click here for more
