If I had a working camera...

[prog]

...there'd be a picture here of the performance artist in Park Street station this morning, a man dressed in flowing gold robes, with matching gold headscarf and facepaint, sitting on a stool and holding a violin, with a live blue parakeet perched on the bow. (It was trained, not fastened; I watched him set up.)

As he set up some T cops stood nearby, talking about previous adventures they'd had chasing down panicky birds that had gotten trapped in the subway; clearly they were nervous about this guy's act. When he took his seat, they approached him, and one cop said "I'll give ya some money" and dropped change in the man's money-bucket. I myself become nervous, fearing that the scene would get tense, so I didn't stick around on the spot, but I did see that, when my train came, the cops were still watching him, at the front of a rather sizeable crowd. I heard singing, but not violin noises. Very strange.