Hamm Lynn, Street Piper

2001: A Busker's Odyssey
or, Notes of a Native Canary
(June '03)

From 1975 through 1982, a length of time that roughly corresponds to that spent by the Prodigal Son away from home, I lived west of the Mississippi, mostly in South Dakota, two years in North Dakota, and in vagabond fashion, a few months in Denver (on three occasions) and a few more in Salem, Oregon. Since my return to my native Massachusetts, I've stayed in touch with western friends with Christmas mailings that have been a boon to the U.S. Postal Service due to excess postage.

From 1983 through 1994, the cards were stuffed with three or four photocopies of columns I had published in local newspapers, but when I quit writing those, I began writing lengthy epistles that might be best called "annual reports." What follows is my report for the year The Boston Globe dubbed Year, Interrupted.

Family updates have been omitted except for a Father's Day date and one Christmas gift that figure in busking scenes. Of the 18 remaining sections, three regarding teaching--"American Monday," "Let's Roll," and "Rigged Deck"--have been extracted, developed, and editorialized for a section of Vignette Street called College-de-Sac. While I was able to omit one passage called "Brother's Keeper" in favor of another extracted Vignette, "Royalty for a Downtown Clown," the three sections on teaching needed to remain in original form to tell of this busker's odyssey through that crack in time.

Musically, 2001 was and still is my best busking year ever. And, yes, I do feel uneasy saying that, even thinking it, about a year that all of us would rather not have had happen.

(January '02)

-1- Artful Dodger

A few years back I was between songs in downtown Salem when approached by the editor of the daily paper, a friend from way back in my Salem State days, in fact the editor of the student paper for which my academic career and my entire life went entirely haywire. She wanted my opinion on some local subject, but I kept dodging her questions--as I now dodge all subjects unrelated to either music or architecture. A seasoned journalist, she persisted with the very technique she herself once showed me--compliment, question, good natured joke, repeat question, _expression of sympathy for the reluctance, repeat question, added comraderie, repeat question, and so on. Finally I said, "Helen, I'm just a dumb musician."

To which she snapped back, "Right! You wish you were just a dumb musician!"

Forgotten as a twee of amusement at a friend's expense, the scene now replays in my memory with as much impression as 9/11 replays on television. I heard her retort during all of that week and still hear it when I chance upon a photograph of Ground Zero. An impatient joke at the time, it was the truth in advance, the most accurate statement ever made about me.

-2- Conversational Lull

Any thought I have of September 11 brings, as well, an immediate flashback to August 22 when I met a friend, a South Dakota transplant/guitarist, to hear Jethro Tull south of Boston. We hadn't spoken in months, and so there was an extended greeting and catching up on each other and mutual aquaintances across the country. Finally a lull in the conversation which he breaks with a remark about that week's rash of bombings, shootings, and threats between Israel and Palestine, "scaring the shit" out of him.

"For God's sake, John, it's always been like that, and always will be. Why bother to pay attention?" (Translation: "We're just dumb musicians.")

He answered, "But this time it's going to blow up in our faces."

-3- American Monday

Maybe I'm a magnet for psychic friends. And I wonder about my own psychic-psychosis whenever I hear the occasional reference--usually quite serious and straight, but sometimes in a sobering joke or comic strip--to September 10 as the last day of "life as we knew it," or "normalcy," or "the good life." More than once I've even heard or seen the word "innocence" used to define what America lost a few months back. And I can't deny the logic from a generation with no recollection of Iran/Contra or The Challenger, and yet another with none of Vietnam and Watergate. Moreover, it's in keeping with our dimished attention spans, both incessantly clicked and increasingly remote, that a single day should replace a decade as the object of our longing for the way things were. Leave the Fifties to Beaver; Father knew best as late as September 10, 2001.

That was the day that I charged four freshman writing classes with a project aimed at defining a word, a concept, on a Monday on the second week of class when all of the intros were out of the way. Passing out copies of six recent news-stories, all of them having to do with free-speech--such as t-shirts in a nearby high-school, lyrics on a music radio station, the use of cellphones in public places--I asked them to look at one word which appeared in all four stories and define it according to the common usage--as if they had just arrived from another planet and had only this to go on. The word was "America." All four stories contained a common declaration--from an indignant student, motorist, or disc-jockey--that "This is America!"

Massachusetts community colleges draw many recent immigrants, often a third of our classes. These students are understandably reluctant to be vocal about such subjects. And then you have the sullen, just-biding-time-between-high-school-and-full-time-employment kids whose single idea of life is to be "cool" (speaking of words in serious search of definition). So there's another third to half of the classes for whom thinking, reading, and especially caring about anything outside of their own personal amusement is "uncool"--and by this time probably impossible since they've both been conditioned and conditioned themselves to be like this since as far back as junior high.

Still, that leaves about five or six responsive students in each class, some with ideas and questions of their own, others with at least a yes or no. Among these, soon into the class, it was unanimous that the definition would be "a condition or place in which anything goes." They agreed to add the clause "without regard for consequences or for other people," although some still clung to what I am starting to regard as "Adam and Eve Syndrome," by adding that it's the parents' fault if something goes wrong, implying that the rest of us have no perogative to prevent it.

"That means that there is no right to govern. So 'America' means 'anarchy'?" I'd ask, and the nervous laughter was enough of an answer.

For me the most enlightening part of class came near the end when I asked that they define it as an adjective, "American." For most it was simply a matter of prefacing the first definition with "having." But when I insisted that they take into account the complaints and confrontations of the six stories, they began adding words such as thoughtless, careless, "in-yo-face" (which made me laugh as much as everyone else), and selfish. At the end of the first class, one student proposed a synonym which made everyone pause. I noticed that even some of the immigrants and sulllens were nodding their heads, and it had the same effect on the later three classes when I offered it a minute before the bell. The word was "inconsiderate."

-4- Jury Duty

Still considering September 10, I drove to Salem for jury duty at eight o'clock the next morning. My schedule last semester was entirely MWF which left me free to busk on TTh (or TR or TX as some colleges choose to abbreviate). I had my instruments and rennie attire in the car to take advantage of the fair day. True, there would be few people downtown during this lull in Salem's tourist trade between Seven Gables Summer and Witch City October, and so it made for one of those ideal practice days, going through the paces of the more challenging classical pieces, trying out new ones with combinations of notes that sure please the eye. If this was like the other four or five times I've gone to jury duty, I'd be out of the courthouse by ten, in the coffeehouse reading the Globe and Harper's till noon, on the bricks behind my stand till three.

Right. Sitting in a large basement room with about 40 other people, not one of whom seemed to know any other of whom, I passed time by taking a scrap of paper and recreating from memory an on-line chess game that was nearing its end. After about fifteen frustrating minutes of examining a few futile moves, I noticed the inescapable trap set for me in Seattle (i.e. the NW corner of the board) while I muddled in Miami. The word "shit" escaped my lips with more than one exclamation point, and I looked up to see three people turned toward me in wonder. Embarrassed, I stuttered in apology until I held up the scribbled scrap--as if it would make any sense to them--and announced, "I just lost a chess game." To make people laugh like that, I should lose more chess games.

As they returned to their newspapers, a janitor appeared in the doorway with another announcement. In Boston there's a very large building called The World Trade Center just across a channel from Logan Airport, so it seemed like no more than a failed take-off. However, when one man asked if it was "terrorism" and the janitor said he didn't know, you could sense that it was something that, no matter how terrible, would be no surprise, was in fact expected. Those of us who, at a distance, missed the word "tower" thought we would see the smoke on the horizon. Some started out as if to do just that, and he left saying he would find a television or radio for us. Cellphones began ringing around the room, and yours unruly, who has long considered the device a damnable anti-social blight, started moving toward people taking calls.

The first call made it clear that it was New York's WTC, and so the word "takeoff" departed and "terror" arrived for those of us still grounded. One of the men who had just laughed at me announced the second hit, also a plane from Logan. Across the room minutes later came the word "Pentagon." There were at least fifteen phones in the room, everyone of them ringing, some more than once, or being used to check in with family during the next half hour. The janitor returned with a radio, a very clear signal from NPR, and loud enough to fill the room, but within minutes came an officer of the court with an order to evacuate the building.

Dismissed as always, but hardly as usual.

As we stood up I mentioned to the fellow next to me that I felt foolish for having cursed over a game. He put both hands on my shoulders: "Friend, I don't want you to lose any chess games, but there's not a person in here who wouldn't rather hear you curse all day long than hear any of this."

-5- Absent Sound

The courthouse is within eight blocks of the Front Street Cafe, a place where I've spent so much time on breaks while busking Salem that they should charge me rent. Instead, they--all of them late-teens and early twenties with the facial hardware and hair tints to prove it--hand me a cup as soon as they see me enter, no matter how long the line. Happens as well at Middle Street in Newburyport and Cafe Brioche in Portsmouth. They know they'll be breaking no bills, and if they're running low on ones or any coin, well that's when a busker becomes a teller who makes deliveries.

On this visit, however, my pockets were as empty as my head. A block from Front Street I was within 50 feet of the hitching post to which I strap my music stand when I stopped to join about seven people--a couple of shoppers, a cop, two telephone linemen, office workers, and now a dumb musician--watching a large-screen television that had been set in a bank window.   We were under the shade of the tree from which cameras and VCRs are aimed at the angle that captures the most picturesque block of Essex Street--often with me whirling in the foreground.

Without the sound, we tried to attach words and phrases from the crawl to the video when the picture changed to a city skyline with the legend "Pittsburgh PA" in the top corner. A few of us gasped at once, two shouts of "What?" and "What the...?"   Perhaps because I had skipped breakfast I was lightheaded and had to break a fall. One of the office workers grabbed my arm, but couldn't speak when I looked at him. Nor could I, so we nodded and I walked off. At the time it seemed an awkward moment, something that Theodore Dreiser would stick into a scene to milk tragic effect, but it keeps recurring in my thoughts--all kinds of thoughts--that anybody who has worked there over the past ten years would recognize me. Was this upscale Salem letting me know that, no matter how much my pirate shirts and bell vests defy their Brooks Bros. suits, I am one of them?

Coincidentally, that was why I hustled to get to Front Street. Familiar faces. But it was a very different cafe that day. The owner had set a television atop a refrigerator, and some dozen customers, standing or sitting, were all looking up. Absently I left the change from a ten in the tip jar and took a seat with my coffee and some kind of pastry I could only point at. A woman stopped in front of me, blocking my view, and I stared at the back of her shoulders as if it made no difference.   Eventually the commentary from this newscast--am I the only one who saw teenagers goofing off behind reporters in the falling ashes and among the ambulances of NYC?--unravelled all of the confusion of the courthouse and Essex Street. The only consolation was that Pittsburgh hadn't been hit, but there were two planes still unaccounted for, yet another from Logan. Before I left, I wondered if Helen might pop in, as she sometimes does from her office half a block away. But it wasn't a day for any editor to be taking a break. That's when her "you wish" remark hit me, and I wondered how much of it conveyed her own envy.

-6- Present Picture

That night I was on as projectionist at the Screening Room. I assured Andy, proprietor-friend-and-now-storyteller, that I didn't mind going in, nor would I mind simply shutting down if no one came. We had an audience of 21, each one of them announcing at the ticket counter a need to get away from the news. The film was from the Czech Republic, set in WWII.   An unlikely comedy for more reasons than its setting, the last scene is the man, emerging from his hideout, to push his newborn in a stroller just after the bombing of Prague. The backdrop is all rubble, including a line of folk passing buckets back and forth. Later in the week, larger audiences broke into applause when the credits rolled. The title of the film was Divided We Fall.

-7- Let's Roll

Next morning found me telling stories to the most attentive classes I've had since Bridgewater State in '89 or South Dakota State in '81, maybe even Central Catholic in '68. Stories about specific mindbending dates: Nov. 22, 1963, delivering newspapers; April 4, 1968, in a dentist's chair; June 5-6-7-8..., 1968, having my high school graduation delayed then transformed into part of a national requiem. I prefaced all of it by saying that I wanted to hear their accounts of how the news hit the campus--or how some heard it along the neon maze called Route 9 as they came or went. Before I yielded the floor, I had to concede that none of those days would match this. In each class a few students mentioned Pearl Harbor, a comparison already prominent in the media. "That's closer, but it was a military base, and Hawaii wasn't a state then. And the middle of the Pacific. Yesterday was here. No, this is the first ever. You..." The pronoun slapped my face... "We have never had to deal with anything like this. Any story we tell will have no conclusion."

Strong beginnings, though, even if half of them opened with "I was listening to my car radio when Howard Stern said he saw a plane hit a building." Those who were at school heard talk of it between eight- and nine o'clock classes. Many teachers took students to the lounge for the big screen. One simply refused to believe her students, upbraiding them for a bad joke as she started into her lecture. (Just as many still in cars didn't believe Howard Stern and kept waiting for a punchline.) About halfway into the period, deans and secretaries went all over campus with the announcement to evacuate.

All stories soon turned into getting in touch with parents, or children, husbands or wives. Many drove into the city to a place of employment, some on upper floors. Others went to telephones and tried to outlast busy signals from 212 and 617. And there were visits to neighbors, among whom were fathers, aunts, grandparents booked on flights leaving Logan, one of whom finally called late in the day from Toronto, most of whom were grounded but incommunicado long enough to draw sweat, four of whom died on one of the two Los Angeles flights. One girl's father was in the second tower, but in the lobby, and so he made it out. His business partner, a close friend of the family, father of five, was still on an upper floor, and so he did not. And another girl simply wasn't in class that day. Or on Friday. Or Monday.

A lot of them aren't in class on any given day, but these are usually the sullens, whom I've come to consider absent even when they do show. The high attendance rate following 9/11 made me think that this might change, but as with any other explosion (no matter that it was so far beyond any other explosion), the bright light dimmed, and by the first week of October I was getting essays that I could sum up in the two or three word catch-phrases of cool: "Get Over It" and "Move On." The engaged students, too, were expressing disillusion in the reappearance of all of the pre-9/11 neuroses of road-rage, impatience at check-out counters, all kinds of rudeness and carelesness in many public places.

"We're back to September 10!" proclaimed one girl, so jovial that she smiles even with bad news.

"But that's what everyone wants, isn't it?" I asked.

"No, I mean our September 10, what we talked about in class on September 10."

The absent girl reappeared but refrained from saying much. Two weekends later, in the parking lot at the renaissance festival, I knew the face in the Boston Globe obituary before I saw the name. Even the _expression was the same underneath a FDNY helmet on an uncle closer in age to her than to me.

The sullens returned to Howard Stern, expecting and getting punchlines.

-8- In Character

On Saturday the 15th I returned to the renfaire wondering if it would be possible to play, let alone prance and dance. The first two weekends had been overwhelmed by humidity, keeping attendance low as everyone flocked to the beach. On Sunday the 9th I had arrived after a sleepless night, looking so bad that Queen Katherine , a woman to whom I had said no more than "Hello" (out of character) and "M'Lady" with a bow (in character) in two seasons, accosted me with serious alarm. "I'm afraid to play," I stammered. Sounded like someone else pronouncing a verdict, and immediately I followed it with my own objection.

M'Lady was having none of it. With a hand under my arm she dragged me to one of the producers. They wanted me to walk around with the royal court, take it easy for the day in the shaded glen. The compromise was my idea. I wouldn't work the queues out in the sun at the ticket counters. I'd stay stationary, playing in the shade. Their agreement made clear something I hadn't noticed in the previous two years: Along with the swordsmen and jousters, my performance is among the most athletic of a cast that is mostly half my age.

Staying out of the sun made all the difference, and by noon I was myself, Hamm Lynn, Hyper Piper. Let the weight-loss program go on!

But what entertainer could be him- or herself the next weekend? There was much written in papers and reported in magazines about performers in the days following 9/11. Even Leno and Letterman, who have done more than anyone to perpetrate the idea that everything is a joke, were pre-empted by horror for days and contrite when they reappeared. Concerts and plays had been cancelled, postponed; symphony orchestras changed their programs; jazz and rock musicians were low key, stoic.

At least a dozen of our performers were absent, stranded as far away as Denver, which located its new airport in southwest Nebraska. Some missed a second week because Logan was still shut down. At the cast call, 45 minutes before opening, most of us were still wondering if we might--if we should--call it off. The director gave us a pep talk, rather eloquent for a woman who rarely addresses us except to say thanks for being here. By the time she finished we were all convinced that anyone entering those gates needed King Richard's Faire, and as soon as she finished, the music director led the singers in "America the Beautiful." (Cast call on any other day ends with a bawdy song, poem, or skit. Take that Lenoman!) We went to our posts still queasy, but later in the day everyone of us said the same thing: As soon as we hit the first note, spoke the first word, made the first grandeloquent gesture, we were on. Really on. On all other days we play the Renaissance, but on 9/15 we were the Renaissance.

Didn't plan it ahead of time because I couldn't bring myself to plan anything, but my ragas (think of them as theme and variation with much emphasis on attack) kept mixing "My Country 'Tis of Thee" as a lament with defiant send-ups of "The Rights of Man Hornpipe" and Stephen Foster's "Hard Times." If I had to submit a sample of my life's work to Peter at the Gate after my final curtain, I would want a tape from that day. And I know that I have never heard the words "Thank You" spoken so deeply, so often.

-9- With Resolve

A concert in New Hampshire the previous night had that effect, as the casette tape, which reached me a week later, testified. A folk-trio called Full Cold Moon (that's December for those of you who don't subscribe to Farmers' Almanac) took the stage with opening numbers both elegant and resolute. The rule is always to start strong, like a card game, banging out with high trump. But what's a rule after 9/11? Wish I had been in the hall that night, but even on the tape, the applause conveys that the audience wasn't just appreciative, but, like the renfaire's, in need.
By the third song they were back in their ebullient Celtic element, with a resolve that had to be an artist's rule after 9/11, playing several colorful O'Carolan tunes. Some of which they stole from me, the bastards!

A few weeks earlier two-thirds of FCM attended another Tull concert with me. (You've all heard of Deadheads, well I am a Tullskull, sitting in the front row both times I want you to know.) The behavior of the younger folk at this concert, as well as our post-concert, wine-soaked commiseration over cellphoners, road warriors, sullen teens, people who begin every sentence with "like," those who wear in-yo-face T-shirts, and everyone else who can't tell the difference between the name Bach and the voice of a neighbor's dog, led us to the observation that Darwin's Theory is now in reverse. A prescient punk-rock band from Akron, Ohio, must have been onto this when they named themselves "Devo," even though their choice smelled more like teen spirit. So we invented the Darwin-in-Reverse Toast:

Take your glass to your lips, take a sip, extend it over the table, clink clink clink, then put it down. With force. With resolve.

And with the Wrath of Grapes that would put us down the next morning.

-10- Ancestral Voices

Truth be told, attendance was down, way down, that weekend and through most of the faire. An undeniable pall made itself felt through the fifth and sixth weekends, and the weather, persistently sunny and warm during the weekdays, always turned cold and damp for us. The seventh weekend we played through winds registering as high as seven on the Beaufort Scale. That's when dying branches say farewell to aging trees, and they did, forcing the closure of one corner of the realm. Not until the eighth weekend, the end, did we play for the crowds and in conditions that usually favor us.

Meanwhile, I struggled with "To Busk or Not To Busk" until September 27, a gorgeous Thursday when I thought Salem would be starting its playful, albeit commercial march toward Halloween. At King Richard's I was part of something larger, and by mid-October Salem would be enough abuzz that I would be adding a sountrack to the Chamber's "Haunted Happenings." But on 9/27 I was, dumb or not, a solo busker facing my debut in the post-9/11 world. Didn't know whether to be disappointed or relieved that so few people were out and about. To my right I could still see the small group, myself among them, looking into the bank window. At times they seemed to be my only audience, yet would pay no attention. Would have been a day reading, practicing, interpreting the usual long-dead German suspects, but instinct called for something brand new.

Two years ago I cut and taped all kinds of music into a couple of slim, old, glossy magazines that I could well secure to my stand, able to withstand a four on Beaufort, a breeze such as the one that spun the plastic bag in American Beauty. Half of one book is filled with O'Carolan tunes undecipherable at the time but collected for future reference.

Welcome to the future. Perhaps so much work on Baroque sheets, especially Telemann's Suite in A-minor, has made me more literate, because I found melody and feeling in a few of the tunes right away. A few others, though garbled on that day's attempts, revealed beautiful phrases that I knew I could capture in time. Ten brand new O'Carolan songs I played over and again, then three more from the collection of Tom Febonio, a friend in Gloucester (two syllables: GLAW-stah). Because it was all new, it was all slow-to-moderate, but resolute, sometimes as if I was joining the chorus of Stan Roger's "Rise Again" or LVB's "Ode to Joy."

Eventually I would give up on four of TOC's tunes and on TGF's "Underfoot," named for his dog. Lovely, joyful tune, with a fetching nonchalance, but the timing still escaped me. Another tune called "Frost Runes" could herald Nat Hawthorne's return to Salem, or Lloyd Garrison's to Newburyport, while "The Train Doesn't Stop in My Hometown," both lament and cheerful acceptance, offers a eulogy for all ancestral voices. The Carolingians (thank Larry Young, a former Salem busker and now fiddler of Poor Richard's Penny, for that term) among you will want to know that two of the new O'Carolan tunes are the racy "Miss MacMurray" and the most elegant "Mrs. Garvey" (#1), likely composed for one of my own ancestors.

Wonderful music, but I confess that I can't help but think of it as my "9/11 Set."

-11- Feathered Target

Salem peaked during what a few of us at King Richard's call "The Ninth Weekend." That's the last one before Halloween, the festival ending a week earlier, leaving us to take a tax-free take, oh yes... The weather cooperated, my Log showing that I played every TTh in October, while Weekend Nine put up the best numbers I've ever logged, save for the same weekend in 1996. Forecasts were for the thermometer to drop by the 31st, when Salem in recent years has turned into a small-scale Mardi Gras a la New Orleans, but it was still sunny and warm enough for me on Tuesday the 30th.

There's an elderly gent in Salem, an inveterate walker reminding me of my father in his final year in Newburyport, often stopping to chat with me briefly between songs. Been going on at least ten years. This day he wanted to talk about a report that surfaced a few weeks earlier: One of the hijackers wrote a letter to a friend warning her to stay off airplanes on 9/11 and away from shopping malls on 10/31. True, Salem is an outdoor "mall," really one downtown street turned into a very wide sidewalk and made scenic with benches, trees, and old lamp-posts. But the sight of "October 31" in that report frightened a lot of Salemites, and I can't deny having been a bit unnerved myself.

He wanted to know if I was planning to play the next day. I started my customary dodging: "Well, I teach till mid-afternoon, and we have a cold-front coming in." He repeated the identical question as often as I hemmed and hawed, nor could I use the "dumb musician" ruse because music was the issue. Finally he asked:

"Have you ever heard of the canary in the coalmine?"

Laughing at the mention of analogy I've often applied to myself, to street-music, I told him that I had used it 20 years ago in an appeal to the Salem Chamber of Commerce to cease their use of outdoor speakers.

"So you're the canary?"

"Have you ever seen a two hundred pound canary?" When he didn't laugh, didn't even smile, I knew I was being taken to school.

After letting his irritation at me settle, he asked, "If you wanted to scare the coalminers, to frighten them, what would you do?"

My mouth dropped. He didn't wait for an answer, taking his leave with the final word: "Please don't come here tomorrow. Hope to see you in the spring."

-12- What Stuff

Buskers always weigh lists of pros and cons each day or night we consider where and whether to make raids. The weather usually dominates these lists, not as a single entry, but as a few: temperature, wind (Beaufort), humidity, sun or clouds, barometric pressure. Then there's food vendors, construction, other events, other buskers, and the possibilty of arrest, the last of which I hadn't considered in years until June when I raided Lexington for the first time (did quite well there, and the police, as in my other haunts, were friendly). There's also the show times of movie theaters (which Andy finds amusing) and plays, which leads people to ask if I'm in the cast (I usually respond, "Not yet"). This was the first time that "might get killed" made the list.

As much as I tried to shrug him off, the old fellow got to me. Even in my dreams that night he appeared on steps I was ascending telling me to beware, an adaptation of the scene when Julius blows off the soothsayer only to enter the senate and promptly buy the farm.

Drove off Plum Island at six next morning to avoid the "moving parking lot," as Michael Dukakis dubbed rush hour on Route 128, on my way to the college, half hoping that the forecast would change to three feet of snow. Wellesley is 55 miles southwest, Salem 25 due south. Geo-logic was to go directly from my one o'clock class to Salem. On the way to Wellesley, the forecast was for a drop in temperature and increased wind, and I could see the advancing front. By the time I arrived, it was a moot point; I would not play. As always, I passed the college and parked at the Quebrada Coffeehouse, my "faculty office" for which the Commonwealth of Massachusetts should pay the rent. Not until I got out of the car did I realize that my instruments, costume, et al, were back on Plum Island.

Apparently, I really didn't mind if Hamm Lynn sat that one out.

-13- Rigged Deck

Speaking of "sitting out," in May '00 I quit working transport to return to the classroom after having used my car and my penchant for reading maps as a way to escape the classroom in May '96. The aftermath of 9/11 convinces me that I was right the first time and I'm already planning a takeback after May '02. Music and film are getting close to half my income, and I've already taken the last two summers off from everything else, enjoying "life in the arts," as I call it. Quit teaching, and I can do more of both. All I need is a two or three day per week delivery job to make ends meet, maybe even clear my head to finally piece together these memoirs. Thought I had such a gig lined up with a company that ships x-rays and other medical "imaging" (hey, I'm just a dumb musician), replacing my own uncle who just quit at age 83. All their drivers are elderly, and so they rather gingerly assure me that they'll have such an opening by September when I would most like it.

Still a chance that they'll call in the next few days, in which case I have already taught my last class. In which case it won't matter that I turned my student evaluations, still blank, into confetti which I submitted in four sealed envelopes during the last week of class. Call it a bureaucratic time-bomb set to go off in mid-March.

I could go on and on with grievances versus administration, but it's really a generation enslaved by this concept of "cool" that makes teaching college freshmen here in the East much like playing cards against a rigged deck. Confront them about attendance, attitude, lack of effort, and cool indifference, and there's rarely a response What few responses there are usually go to a dean, who, under the business model to which Massachusetts and New Hampshire colleges (observing my borders here) now conform, reflexively reaches for the bottom line: The customer is always right.

Most teachers, keenly aware of this and unwilling to risk having their student evaluations turned into another kind of time-bomb, let it all slide. A self-perpetuating avalache. But these schools don't need teachers so much as they need drill sergeants, so I should go AWOL. And if I seem to be exaggerating this through my lenses of The Sixties or The 16th Century, then please send me your answer to one 21st Century question:

Do you want to be in a place where people habitually walk in and out of rooms yapping on cellphones?

-14- Father's Solstice

[Not long after the semester's end, the Globe ran the photo that is the subject of an entry on the Vignettes Page, "Royalty for a Downtown Clown," and which prompted me to add some mime to my busking shtick.] And not long after that, an unusual green and white photo of Benjamin Franklin, perhaps the only busker in history to have his picture put on currency, appeared in my basket in Salem on the Summer Solstice.

A pleasant Thursday, it wasn't busy so I was playing more of the formal, Baroque music, stationary behind my stand, not expecting much more than the $20 or $25 in two hours on such days. My daughter and I had a rendezvous back here in the late afternoon. She had been living just outside Boston while Ben, her beau, finished his master's at Harvard, and one of her gigs was as a consultant for the web-site design of a Newburyport travel agency. A fair Sunday is prime-time for a busker, and so she suggested a weekday when she knew she would be here to take me out to dinner.

Now this may be a rite of passage that all of us would rather delay, but when it comes, the idea of having your kid pay for your meal is most satisfying, verging on gleeful. Packing up in Salem after an almost leisurely performance, I had plenty of time to get home before her arrival, might even have a beer and start gloating that she would also drive to the restaurant. As always, I pack everything before I touch the basket. (First rule of busking: Your cash register stays open as long as possible. Second rule: Never hurry to leave.) And that's when I saw the double zero on the corner of a bill that seemed too white to be American. I may have rolled my eyes recalling a Greek bill two years ago, so crisp and colorful that I could hardly stand to wait overnight for a bank to open and find out how rich I had become. Next morning's answer was 19 cents, not including the $5 conversion charge. And so that bill joined a few fistfuls of coins from all over the globe in a jar that every busker keeps.

When Rain arrived I had to show it to her right away. Still don't know if I was offering to pick up the tab due to the day's good fortune or if I was adding yet another reason to gloat, to rub it in. We went to place across the river that famously, fabulously bakes pizza in a wooden oven. But if I was a relatively cheap date for the food, I still ran the tab a bit with a couple pints of pale ale. And returned home with Ben Franklin's photo still in my wallet.

-15- Taxing Wager

"Too white to be American." I'll bet a Franklin you've never seen or heard that before.

-16- Rescue Efforts

Fingerless gloves, a Christmas present, from my daughter's mother came in, um, handy (sorry), but longjohns provided by my mother on a Christmas Past made it possible for me to open First Night Quincy. Quite sure I was the first performer to stomp and swing into action among the ice sculptures in the plaza next to City Hall. The sun had yet to set, and television crews still outnumbered the early celebrants bracing themselves against our first coldsnap.

The fellow in charge suggested two indoor venues for any time that I wanted to be out of the cold: the high school gym, set up as an oversized romper room for kids; and the atrium of Presidents Place, filled with tables and chairs before a stage already stacked with amplifiers for the jazz and rock bands that would come later. The romper room was flooded with blasting hard rock favored by the teens working the hotdog and cotton candy stands in its center, but the atrium was unclaimed long enough for me to work the crowds as I do at the renfaire. When the band was ready, I beat a retreat down the corridor, bracing for the outdoors when I heard a frantic knock on a window. A man in a green and brown uniform opened the adjacent door.

"Are you the puppeteer?'

In a modest storefront were about two dozen adults and as many or more small children awaiting a performer who had yet to show. Hamm Lynn to the rescue! Midway into my opening jig I realized that my host was the National Park Service, although in Quincy it would more accurately be called The Adams Family Information Center. (In Quincy you golf at Presidents Country Club, bowl at Presidents Lanes, lodge at Presidents Inn, and on and on, no apostrophe, always plural.) Instinctively I started bouncing and mugging at and away from the austere portraits of John, Abigail, J.Q., Henry, and Charles. By the time the puppeteer arrived he looked around as if he had walked into someone else's gig. And he was right, but I was out of breath, and so I improvised his intro:

"Boy, are they glad to see you... And so am I!"

Outside the sun had gone down and Beaufort had gone up. Gloves back on, I hammed into the crowd now viewing the scuptures. Knowing that the wind-chill would soon shut the instruments down, I went all out, which turned out to be just long enough to satisfy I don't know how many television cameras and newsphotographers.

My break was just in time for me to warm up before going back out for the parade. A four piece Dixieland band was bickering over whether or not they could play--two of them did not have fingerless gloves. Hamm Lynn to the rescue again! When I went to my bag to retrieve the new pair, I realized that an old, baggy pair was still in it. My intent was simply to march with them and cut capers for crowds, but I did join "When the Saints Go Marching In."

The parade was followed by fireworks, followed by a lasar show on the facade of Presidents Place across from City Hall. That much I knew. What I didn't know was that the latter was accompanied by booming disco music that made the plaza and anything near it impossible to play. Barely seven o'clock and I thought my night was over. I went to look at the First Night map I had put into my bag on the third floor of City Hall to see if I could locate another venue. On the second floor was the city council chamber, a large room that had been turned into an art exhibit--with no recorded music to fill its air.

Hamm Lynn to his own rescue! After shedding the excess under-garments upstairs, I claimed a corner of the exhibit with my music stand and a series of 45 minute sessions and 15 minute breaks that went to the close of the exhibit at 10:30. As with the streets and the renfaire, I thrive on moving audiences, but unlike my roles as busker and rennie, First Night Quincy turned into a relatively formal, classical gig. Had I known it ahead of time I might have forgone the costume for a suit and tie.

Each session began with the 9/11 Set, the last measures of "Mrs. Garvey" turning into "Greensleeves," and when young children appeared I launched into "Miss MacMurray," "Kemp's Jig", "O'Keefe's Slide", and an eccentric send-up of O'Carolan's "Mrs. Cole." The rest of it went for Baroque. Was very thankful that the First Night staff approved, not because of any contract or coldsnap, but because they were a "captive" audience.

-17- Street Piper

Something very satisfying about finishing 2001 with a composed artistic effort, something of a reward for all of the foot-stomping hype of street-piping through the interrupted year. The irony of playing Tom's "Street Piper" in a council chamber colored the tone with such emotion that I could feel pairs of eyes turning away from the canvases to look toward me. One woman started looking at the book, first at the sheet with the title, then at the cover. When I finished she asked, "Are you T.G. Febonio?"

"Not yet," I said.

Two years ago, another Portsmouth busker, a guitarist, took a liking to the song, and so I gave him a copy. We played it as a duet in front of Cafe Brioche a few times. Early last year he prepared it along with Mel Bay's "Master's Favorite" and other works with another guitarist for a concert in a Portsmouth church. I never busk Portsmouth until Memorial Day, so I missed it, and it wasn't until the woman asked that question that I made the connection: A song written for and about me was one of two featured pieces in a classical concert. Except for the Summer Solstice, that would have been the highlight of my year, and I wasn't even there...

The Quincy City Hall performance made up for that, which rendered my non sequitur in a way psychic. Driving home I played an earlier Full Cold Moon tape, made a year ago to this First Night. Before long I stopped it so that one song could play on a loop in my head until I arrived here right at midnight. That's when I get a song.

"Underfoot" is underway.

-18- American Canary

In the days I've been preparing this, I've been taking my two and three mile walks into Plum Island's wildlife and bird sanctuary, sometimes on the shore, sometimes on the paved road overlooking the marsh, crossing the dunes on the raised boardwalks at Parking Lots Two and Three. Very few folk out here this time of year, I see many duck and Canada geese, sometimes a family of deer, and on rare occasions a maverick racoon or fox. Today I came within 30 feet of a grey owl, perched on the handrail along PL3's boardwalk. We stared at each other for more than a minute before he lumbered off. He seemed neither surprised nor even interested to be looking at a canary that he didn't outweigh by about 30 pounds.

Long range forecasts for global warming say that this whole glorified sand-bar will be under the Atlantic in another 30 years. No point in being bitter, I know, but that was about to force itself as America's foremost concern had it not been for "God Bless Consumerism." All I can say is that this canary will be more than glad to surrender some street time should we ever decide to save the mine. For a piper, however, there's no holding breath.