At the entrance to the park, the rose hips have gone deep orange.  Gomphrena and celosia still dominate, but now there is an invasion of wild asters.  They push forward, out from under trees, showing up in the more organized beds and at the feet of Daniel Webster.

The wood anemone is 6 feet tall, and has flower clusters forming at the growing tip of every stem.  The first plant sported 5 open flowers, no more than 3 inches in diameter, among scores of buds; the second plant, farther from the path, was shorter, with only 3 flowers.

Center stage was mine.  After a quarter hour, I got my first tip from a man who’d been there when I arrived.  A song or 2 later, a woman, who’d also been there before me, came up and gave me a dollar.  “I like your backup group,” she said, with a nod to the trio of toy hula girls rocking in the sun on the ledge of the fountain.  She reminded me that we’d met before.  Her name was Carole.  “My mother said we spelled it with an ‘e’ like Carole Lombard.”

A teenage girl, walking by, gave me a quarter.

When a pack of bicyclists entered the area, their leader, a swarthy 20-something man with a radiant grin, gave me the thumbs-up.  I asked if he had time for a hula today.

“A hula?  I’m Mexican, we don’t hula in Mexico.”

“You’re in New York now,” I said.  The other bikers in his group teased him.  They were a mixed assortment of attractive people, like a Benetton ad.  I reeled him in, got a lei around his neck, started telling him about the hukilau, then he balked.

“He needs help.  Come join him,” I said to the others.  A slim blonde Slovakian got off her bike and took a lei.  At the end of “The Hukilau Song,” the man put $2 in my case.  “Thanks,” I said.  “You’re a good sport.”

Later, another pack of bicyclists rolled in.  This time, an Ecuadorian girl ended up with a lei around her neck, but she didn’t want to dance if her friends wouldn’t dance, and her friends wouldn’t dance.  She gave me back the lei and walked away.

On the bench, a 20-something woman, with earbuds, rolled a cigarette.  Through several songs, while involved with her phone, she took one puff at a time, having to relight her cigarette with every puff.  When she got up to leave, she gave me a buck.

It was time now for me to leave.  I prepared to sing “My Little Grass Shack,” when a man, who had been standing to my left, out of sight, put a dollar in my case, thereby closing the day with a respectable $6.25.