SECRET STUFF

Quite often when reading an interview with a celebrity I've noticed the interviewer will pose the question: "What's the one thing about you that few people know?"

Seeing as how I've never been, nor ever will be, a celebrity that is a question I am unlikely to be asked. Despite that, I want to reveal what my answer would have been.

Friends know that I occasionally sing at a wedding , a funeral, a cantata, and maybe even a vascectomy or two.

What they don't know is that singing is not the limit of my musical accomplishments. At one time I played a mean harp. No, not the kind you put in your mouth, but, an honest to goodness string harp.

Rosemarie Botticelli, a semi-retired school teacher at Grove City College, took me under her wing, and taught me how to play her harp 2 or 3 evenings a week during my Freshman and Sophmore years. Rosemarie was a good teacher.

I haven't played in years and for good reason. Harps are not an inexpensive instrument. A Cherub student harp can run $11,000 or more and Venus Gold harps cost anywhere from $26,000 to $54,000 nowadays.

Fortunately, back in the 70's when I played they were much cheaper. I bought mine from a unusual chamber group in Sewickley that disbanded. The harp was really beat up and I suspect it had been handed down from days of yore. The groups harpist let me buy it on time..

I paid the monthly fees out of small gigs where the sound of a harp was needed and/or a chamber group or small orchestra wanted to add one on the cheap.

The most unusual request for my expertise was from a discoteque owner in Youngstown, Ohio . It was really more of a bar and was owned by a Chinese fellow who looked Jewish . His name was Samuel Fran. Everybody called him Sam, but, never Sammy.

Sam was a character, no matter what his true heritage might have been. Like many club owners back then Sam stayed in business , made a steady profit, and was open several hours after midnight due to his weekly payoffs to the local constabulary. He occasionally threw in a couple meals and of course, waived the cover charge.

His reward was a free hand to distribute drugs and host some serious money poker games. His place actually had one of those old Prohibition sliding window things in the back door that allowed his bouncer folks to preview the customers before they were admitted.

Sam had once heard me play in a concert I did with the Youngstown Symphony. He tracked me down via my booking agent in Oakland. It seems there was an emergency at his club. His band lost their piano player in the early morning hours (for keeps) due to an overly generous poker hand he awarded himself.

Sam didn't like the local talent and felt the incident damaged the clubs reputation. He turned out to be a huge harp fan , adored the Marx brothers, and saw this as an opportunity to dress up the club. Go figure!

I had a payment due on the harp and figured playing music in a discotheque wasn't any weirder than a lot of other things I had done in my youth. I agreed to fill in with the group and drove there on a Saturday afternoon so I could go over some of the arrangements with the guys.

Strangely enough we clicked and I had time to enjoy a few "lime rickeys" before the performance.

We had finished a couple of sets for the Travolta look-a-likes when we heard a horrendous noise coming from the direction of the front door. The door was losing a battle with a battering ram.

While Sam had paid off the locals he never counted on being raided by the Feds. Still, he was a cautious sort of guy. All of us scattered down the cellar steps after Sam. They led to a underground hallway/tunnel connected to the building next door behind which Sam kept his Cadillac DeVille.

We all piled in the Caddy and never looked back.

The feds confiscated everything, including my harp. I still owed about half of the purchase price. I eventually paid off the debt with a small discount thrown in for telling my story, but, I never played again.

I think I was permanently scarred from that night when I left my harp in Sam Fran's Disco.