Pearls Before Breakfast
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 8, 2007; Page W10
HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L'ENFANT
PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH
BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in
jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap.
From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his
feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed
money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.
It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the
middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the
violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by.
Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all
of them, a government job. L'Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal
Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those
indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager,
budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.