San Francisco Crazies

We ran into several odd people while we were in San Francisco. Our first one was a woman working at the local Safeway collecting grocery carts. She's hustling carts, bagging groceries and carrying on conversations with customers left, right and center.

On Saturday we went downtown and a couple of women asked us for money in very polished and polite phrasing, not your typical requests for "spare change". We also saw a tap dancer and several musicians. The tap dancer was a black man about seven feet tall and a hundred and fifty pounds, no shirt and he's dancing on a steel plate about two feet in diameter. We saw guys playing trumpet, saxophone and drums. One mad drummer in front of the Ferry Building had a sign promoting his YouTube video. He also had a group of fans dancing. Then there was this pair of guys with the accordion and drum:
Click the pick to see the video.

On Sunday we went from a walk in the park out to Land's End. We saw this guy going the other way. He seemed a little off. He was looking at some plants by the side of the path and he pulled one up. He only has one sock and he has an empty id holder clipped to his shirt. On our way back we catch up with this same guy, and again he is looking at something on the ground by the side of the path. He picks it up and examines it. He notices us walking by and he turns to me and hands me a key telling me something about his "soistahs" and to take a few days for myself at Goth (Gough?) & Broadway. Then he walks off on another path, smiling and waving. Why did he pick me? Later on daughter tells me she could smell alcohol on him.

On Monday we spent some time walking around the Fisherman's Wharf area, which is mega-tourist land. We're walking down the sidewalk. The edge of sidewalk along the street has stuff on it like parking meters, plants, signs, trash cans, etc. Up ahead we see a couple walking and just as they pass by a bush, the bush leans out and roars at them. Gave them a start and gave everyone else a good laugh. 30 seconds later the performance repeats itself. I howled. I gave the guy running this ruse a buck. Funniest thing I've seen in a while.

Tuesday we went to Haight-Ashbury just to see what it looked like. There was one black man sitting on a box on a corner yelling his head off. It was mostly unintelligible, but occasionally I thought I could hear him say "Get A Room".

On Wednesday, on our way to the airport we were stopped at a light and we saw a woman stop in the middle of crosswalk and put on some kind of performance. She might have talking to someone in another car, or someone we couldn't see, or someone who wasn't there. She was gesturing and, for want of a better word, posing. It was quite a show.