Best entertainment for a buck

You're at Park Street, heading home from work, tired, annoyed. You resent the dozens of people crowding around you on the Red Line platform. And you're developing a powerful irritation at the scruffy guy with hippie clothes and an open guitar case, playing the bass and singing some faux-naive platform music. Until, for one second, you let your guard down and realize that Tom Bianchi is singing about the T itself. You catch a line of his song - "Here comes the outbound train" - and another: "Please step back from the yellow line." They're woven seamlessly into whatever he's singing. Other people realize this too: the guy is funny, and he's singing about exactly what's happening to all of us right this second. Hey, we're kind of funny. The next song is a reference to the change piling up in his bass case: "I Don't Know What To Do with Canadian Money" ("Instead of George Washington I see the Queen/It does not work in the token machine"). You can't help it: you laugh, and you're forced to notice that other people are laughing with you. Your day is getting better exactly when it was not supposed to, and you are involuntarily drawn into a kind of communion with all the other people on the platform for whom the same thing is happening. Other street musicians, even much more talented ones, cannot do this: galvanize a bunch of lonely, bored people into a community with nothing in common except the stupid, involuntary grin creeping across their faces. You even feel a little disappointed when the train comes.