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                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 3

    Once I discovered the standing room lines at the Metropolitan Opera House, they seemed a perfect lab to test whether New York would be as welcoming as my San Francisco home. On a sunny October morning I slung the concertina over my shoulder in its leather-strapped bag, and headed for Lincoln Center. I forget what the show was, but some hundred people were already standing in a line that snaked along the front lobby toward the shuttered box office window.

    They were reading the morning paper, sipping hot beverages, chatting softly and amiably and wafting a low murmuring buzz around the lofty marble and glass foyer. I sized up the scene, took a few deep breaths, unbuckled the concertina bag, folded back the velvet lining and withdrew my instrument. I gave it a few silent tugs and squeezes to let it breathe, closed my eyes and mentally rehearsed my habitual pre-show invocation: “May this performance demonstrate the beauty, joy and freedom of the Holy Spirit.”

    They were reading the morning paper, sipping hot beverages, chatting softly and amiably and wafting a low murmuring buzz around the lofty marble and glass foyer. I sized up the scene, took a few deep breaths, unbuckled the concertina bag, folded back the velvet lining and withdrew my instrument. I gave it a few silent tugs and squeezes to let it breathe, closed my eyes and mentally rehearsed my habitual pre-show invocation: “May this performance demonstrate the beauty, joy and freedom of the Holy Spirit.”

     I was considering what to sing next when there approached an aged usher with a brass-buttoned crimson uniform and a colorless face, his small frame quivering with out- rage. “What’s dat supposed to be?” he barked. Without waiting for reply, he ordered me to put dat ting away and pipe down.

     I contemplated him quizzically and the blonde woman said, “Oh come on, that was nice.” He ignored her and persisted in insisting that I desist. A tweedy fellow with a grad- student beard and then others nearby began to protest. The sentiment spread. But the dour old usher stayed relentlessly on message until voices from the back began to boo him.

         “Ya see?” he lectured me, “ now yer creatin’ a distoibance.”

        “Actually I’d say you’re the one creating the disturbance,” I suggested

         He glared at me, his eyes frosty with veto, and said, “You can’t sing in here. Dis is an opera house!”

                                                                                                             Hanan – CONFESSIONS - 4   

                                                                2.

     This was hardly my first clash with an authority figure who clamped down on mu- sic I was making in public. In my home town of Washington, D.C., I was arrested for singing and hauled off to a police lockup (it was the Nixon era). In Palenque, Mexico, my arrest by the local sheriff and his thugs was aborted by a mob of well-disposed townsfolk who rescued me, whisking me off to a secluded cabin that turned out to be a storehouse of magic mushrooms. (Turn the pages for more on altered states.)

     The Palenque incident was a climax to some four months of backpacking across Mexico and Guatemala that began in December of 1973. The commune on Shrader Street had reached a plateau of smooth running that easily would continue without me (or so I was eager to believe), and I’d made enough money that summer and fall at the Ferry to take off until spring brought the tourists back.

     On a good weekend at the Ferry, from April through October, passengers for Sausalito would start lining up about half an hour before departure. The old terminal at the foot of Market Street funneled ticket holders into a long passageway, walled to a height of four feet, with a blue-and-white striped awning for shade. It led to the gate where at loading time they surrendered their tickets and boarded the boat.

     Facing this captive audience, in bright sunlight, was an empty asphalt lot in which for years I cavorted around, singing a cappella (at first) or improvising (initially) snappy patter. With each fresh boatload the bills and coins and occasional contraband would pour into my upturned hat, at intervals of ninety minutes four or five times a day. A good weekend added up to anywhere between two and three hundred bucks. This at a time when my share of the rent was fifty-five dollars a month.

    If I’d been paying taxes in those days I might have written off the Mexico trip as a business expense. From the live recording a friend made of the act that summer (he brought his eight-track recorder down to the Ferry), it was obvious that some kind of ac- companiment would help to anchor my renditions of famous ditties that too often drifted into unforeseen keys. I had never learned to play an instrument, could barely read music beyond a fourth-grade level, but had a good ear. And then the perfect solution, a concer- tina, portable and picturesque, came my way for a paltry fifteen bucks. But it soon be- came clear that San Francisco’s endless distractions would hinder my learning to play it.