Taxi Driver

During the ride back to Brooklyn tonight, I was lost in my thoughts for a few minutes until the some great, unfamiliar soul and blues on the radio took me out of myself. I asked the cabdriver what station we were listening to, and all of a sudden, he came to life. "Oh, this is the Columbia station. Every Tuesday night they play great soul for a few hours," he informed me. He asked me excitedly if I liked soul music - I answered that I did and then he started peppering me with questions about where I grew up, my background, etc. He was a Bronx native, still living there, obviously intelligent and obviously very eccentric. A classic New Yawker. The kind of guy who argues about the Yankees while eating a hot dog with mustard dribbling on his shirt while reading Moby Dick. I asked him if he thought that people would be interested in buying this kind of music in perhaps a slightly more modern context. "Oh yeah," he exclaimed, "There's always people out there who are DYING for this kind of stuff."