Sign of the Times

Having lived most of my life in cities with very large homeless populations, I find myself not precisely hardened to the problem, but more detached than I should be. I don't like this detachment--I think it's a symptom of the ethical anaesthesia that lets us live useless or damaging lives.

But this post isn't about self-flagellation.

It's about signs. One of the side effects of my daily callousness toward the homeless problem is my connoisseurship of panhandling signage. These fall into certain categories:

The heartrending:

Social services has my kids

or

Vietnam veteran--HIV+

Ok, this last one would be more devasting if its owner weren't in his late thirties/early forties and therefore unlikely to be a Vietnam vet. Maybe he's a veteran of too many Full Metal Jacket viewings.*

The sadly humorous:

Will work for hugs. Money ok, too.

or

Won't lie. Need beer.

The ironic meta-sign:

Sad Story

Well, one thinks they've seen every possible category of sign, but today I saw a new one that's left me a little stymied. It didn't belong to a traditional panhandler, but to a busker, which is weird enough in itself. The buskers are almost invariably sign-free and careful to distinguish themselves from street people. Busking around here is considered a honorable profession--advocates for the noise-polluting institution like to point out that Tracy Chapman and Mary Lou Lord both got their start busking here.**

But today I saw this busker with a sign. She certainly didn't look homeless--she was rather fashionably, if somewhat trashily, dressed in a low cut top and thigh-high boots. She had elaborately dressed hair and well-manicured (if somewhat trahsy) fingernails. She was singing a torch song, something about being done wrong. And by an upturned hat she had a sign that read (I'm not kidding):

Please help. Need to get prescription for antibiotics filled.

I just don't know what to make of this. Apart from the weirdness of this woman's in-between-ness, half busker and half well-dressed panhandler, the specificity of her sign just threw me. Antibiotics? Isn't that a lot of information?

I sort of felt like telling her that all I could see when I looked at her sign was:

Got the Clap. Need the Cure.

But then, I'm not a very nice person.

There's no point to this story.

*When I was a bartender, I heard lots of stories about Vietnam. I'm sure that at least half of those guys were never there. There was one cusotmer who would try to convince me that he was a Vietnam vet, despite his being in his clearly thirties (this was about ten years ago). I even carded him once, just to make sure. He was born in 1963. So unless he was VERY precocious, I'm sure he never fought Charlie on the delta. Just sayin'. You'd think these guys could at least update it to the Gulf War. Or maybe Granada--that would at least be original.

**I know that I've bitched about the buskers before, and I know how miserably curmudgeonly it sounds. I swear that I never hated street musicians until I moved to the busking capital of the free world. On any given day when the weather's decent, there are 5-10 of them in a three block radius and many of them are amplified (ugh) so that their sonic real estate overlaps. This ceases to be music and it just noise pollution. Also, I am a curmudgeon.