“Do you leave your TV on all of the time?” I asked Drummer Dan.
“Yeah. It seems to discourage burglars.”
We were unloading his drum set from the back of the golf cart after playing at the Road Kill Bar on Monday. Dan’s TV was blaring out an infomercial pleading for donations to adopt a child from a Third World Country for only $24 a month.
“I wonder if that organization is legitimate or whether it’s just a ripoff,” I said.
“I don’t care either way,” Dan said. “I wouldn’t give that guy a dime.”
“Why is that?”
“I went to one of his fundraising lectures years ago back in California. He started talking about the poor children in Central America so I decided that when they passed the collection basket I would donate five dollars. He kept speaking and he talked so well that pretty soon I upped it to twenty.”
“He must be pretty persuasive.”
“I guess he is,” Dan said. “By the time he had been talking for half an hour I was ready to donate one hundred dollars.”
“Did you?”
“Not exactly. If he had stopped then and there I probably would have, but he kept on talking. Twenty minutes later I had cut my mental donation back down to seventy-five dollars. After a full hour lecture I was down to giving only ten dollars.”
“Did you donate ten dollars?”
“I would have, but they didn’t pass the donation basket until he had talked for an hour and twenty minutes, and when the basket came around I took five bucks out of it.”
