The Flower Lady

Every city has at least one. You know who I'm talking about: the lady that goes to every major establishment in town with a few dozen roses and carnations in tow, trying to sell flowers to inebriated, horny men at black market prices. The men of course, pay these insane prices in hopes that their minor investment will pay off in other ways later in the evening.

The lady that sells flowers in my community is a strange one. It's a little known fact that she is greatly resented in my city. It's not that she's rude or persistent -- in fact she's quite friendly. It's just my friends and I would "run into her" three or four times in a night while we were hopping bars, and they more or less became annoyed that she would approach them again and again.

Now the trumpet player in the Savoys is an all-around boisterous guy. He's tall, loud, friendly, and will talk to anyone. I don't know when it began, but as long as I can remember playing in this band, our trumpet player has made an effort to talk to the flower lady when she would arrive at the club we were playing.

Well this week, the unthinkable happened. The flower lady arrived at our club with not just flowers in tow. She also had in her possession a trumpet and a flute.

It became clear to me that our trumpet player was trying to get her up to jam with us. And "jam" she did.

The outcome was nowhere near average, though it was marginally better than terrible. She played along to one of our numbers, strangely in key, though not really paying much attention to what the other players were doing. I learned at the end of the song that she had only started learning how to play the flute for two months.

She played her song, and then promptly gathered her belongings to go to another bar with the intent to sell more flowers to drunks.

A part of me silently hopes that getting amateurs up on the stage to jam with us won't become a habit.

Song of the day: "Tears" -- The Stone Roses