Sometimes it takes a terrible person to bring out the best in people. This is just what happened recently to a TikTok street musician named theandrewshoe. He was playing the Billy Joel classic “Piano Pan” when a woman came and knocked over his keyboard – then stole from his tip jar.
The whole thing was caught on video and went viral, and even pop singer Charlie Puth reached out to support him. Let’s start from the beginning, here.
Andrew set up his camera behind him like he usually does, and then narrated what happened to him in the unfortunate incident. The video is captioned “the piano survived.”
The video’s filmed at night, and shows Andrew performing for different groups of young people.
“This is one of the worst things someone’s ever done to me while street performing,” he said in the clip.
He’s playing, people are enjoying it, and then a woman comes out of nowhere and slams her hand down on the keyboard. Have you heard of main character energy? This woman (we’ll name her in a bit) has it in heaps.
It’s not like Andrew is cleaning up, anyway. On average, a street performer can make about $50 a weekday and maybe $100 on a weekend. That’s maybe $350 on a good week? That’s a sweet $16,800 a year, which is about $2,000 above the United States poverty level.
The point is, he’s scraping by. OK, back to the video. He’s playing and the woman comes back. This time, she goes right up to him, presses on the keyboard again, and pushes it onto the floor.
She feigns a look of shock before she bends down and steals money from his tip jar. Onlookers boo her, but when you’re the main character, none of that matters.
She says something about giving him money, pretends to reach into her purse, but then bends over and steals money from him, prompting a “hey!” from Andrew.
In the aftermath, a nice young man hands Andrew some money and says, “take all of it.” Others help him get his piano back on the stand. It’s a really sh**ty situation made better by kindness from strangers.
This would be the end of it, but this is the Internet, so. Over on r/ImTheMainCharacter, they tracked her down. Here’s what one user said they found from an article:
“Shauntae Heard recently took to Facebook to apologize for her actions. She revealed that she had personally apologized to the TikToker and performer. Heard also pleaded with her followers to keep her family out of the internet drama. She wrote in her social media post:
‘I’m sorry for everyone that has seen the viral video. I have took accountability for my actions. I know it was wrong and ignorant of me but please keep my family out of it.’ The TikToker also claimed that she did not steal money from the pianist.”
They also found an alleged previous arrest, for credit card fraud.
Here’s what she said in a follow up post:
“Y’all are pathetic the way y’all commenting under my post y’all can’t tell me how I feel or what I did y’all should get a life and leave me alone y’all are grown and have nothing else to do I know what I did and again I know that it was wrong I don’t need y’all people in my comments telling me how y’all feel cause it really don’t matter about how y’all feel about anything it’s up to the person and we already talked and we are good so f**k y’all.”
Very contrite. Would she be so sorry if she hadn’t gotten caught? Who knows. Oh, and here’s Andrew answering Charlie Puth reaching out to him.
Until next time! Be nice to each other.