That is his way of reminding his neighbors of his existence. Yet, this kind of self-advertisement in one's own courtyard is unusual for musicians. Aware of his value, proud, and sorely sensitized by the competition, Gică resorts to that stratagem only with unspeakable suffering. But he has no choice. He must live. Before the revolution, when he was still in full strength, he could manage better. He had accustomed himself to a somewhat better life than that of the Romanians in the village and now he finds it hard to lag behind. Yes, he could very well choose to till the land, but he will not even hear of that. It would humiliate him too much. It would remind him of his wretched childhood. (However, less ambitious lăutari do often work as cultivators too.) He must live and he must live well. The more so as, having recently become a bachelor again, he has made up his mind to remarry and his fiancée, a young Gypsy woman, is not easy to satisfy.

Gică Diricel is battling against adversity, but he won't win. He will only manage to live from hand to mouth and to go on being respected. His native village and region are going forward and donning fast the symbols of modernism. Gică knows too few hits of the day and seems unable to learn. His voice and bow have weakened, his accompanists are a bit oldish, his old songs and tunes -- not in great demand anyway -- are no longer so convincing as in the past. Unfortunately, his heroism is tinted with sourness, for he can hardly cope with defeat.

Gică's life is full of events and circumstances which single him out from his rural community. None of them is unusual in itself -- two mixed marriages (first that of his parents, then his own), his childhood with a stepmother, the controversy with his father and brother, his inability to start his marital life like everybody else in the parents' home or in his own, his childless marriage, his adopted son's delinquency and failure, and his fruitless efforts to stay at the top of his profession --, but each of them has been a disadvantage and  their accumulation is pushing him toward marginality. So that Gică has had to fight continually with all his might to obtain and maintain his status of an honorable man in his village. In addition, a Gypsy musician generally finds himself in an ambiguous situation because both his profession and his ethnicity make him a ?stranger? to the community, though not as alien as Gică's wife -- who has come from almost 1000 kilometers away, has no relatives in the village, and speaks Romanian with a different accent from that of the locals.

In his life, Gică Diricel has been a stranger for an endless number of times. First, in his family, although his father's relatives surrounded him with love, they have, nevertheless, always considered him half Romanian. Then, in his father's home, he was a stranger to his Gypsy stepmother and to his half brother.