276 Minutes With... Hopalong Andrew

Traveling the children’s-entertainment circuit with Brooklyn’s lasso-swinging cowboy musician.

- By Lisa Miller

Andrew Vladeck keeps four weather apps on his phone and checks them at intervals throughout the day. In temperatures higher than 36 degrees, he can still strum his guitar, but much colder and his fingers freeze. “Suddenly drizzling!” he once texted me as I was en route to a show. “The weather app said no rain and now it’s raining and there are two people here.” But a recent Tuesday was ideal: sunny, mid-60s, the trees in bloom. About 50 caregivers and children gathered in Underwood Park, in Clinton Hill, to enjoy Vladeck’s set. Preschoolers mobbed the stage— pogoing, shimmying, and singing along; one skidded into and nearly toppled Vladeck’s cymbal stand—while some of the tiniest kids, mere babies, sat on laps and cried. “Who can clap?” he asked after a couple of verses of a song called “Can’t You Dance the Polka?” “Who can hop?” Then he praised the children in his silky twang: “Good, good.”