San Fran City Hall: Brother, Busted Again!

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Puccini, Madame Butterfly Aria

Shades of my run-in with authority in the foyer of NYC’s Empire State Building where I was asked to cease and desist once before. And I have a funny feeling it won’t be the last time!

I had just finished recording a couple of improvs on my North American Love Flute, getting thumbs up and smiles from the few early-morning passersby in the building, when a security guard – the one heard at the end of this recording – called out to me from an upper level, on the third tier of this massive interior, over 250 feet away. She suggested that I should stop playing, and I beseeched her as much with hand gestures for ‘just one more minute’.

She called out that she would be right over: surely it would take her at least a minute to get to where I was located! Not simply to flaunt authority, I got right to work and started into the same Puccini Aria that I had recorded half an hour earlier in the ornate lobby of San Francisco’s oldest hotel, all part of my research into ‘comparative acoustics’…really!

The curious thing is that in the course of shutting me down, both of these individual security guards (Empire State, San Fran City Hall) made a point of saying ‘how beautiful’ or ‘how pretty’ the music sounded – they both also cited how ‘rules are rules’, suggesting that it was not their personal decision to bust me, but that they were simply executing the orders of an otherwise invisible authority. I guess it’s called ‘doing your job’, and that’s fine with me: I’ll continue to do mine and they can do theirs!

I found it oddly gratifying afterwards to see a gaggle of five security guards huddled together with their walkie-talkies cracking away, deep in a debriefing session after successfully busting the lone guerilla flutist! For some reason, describing this scenario reminds me of the famous photo from the sixties of the hippie as she places a daisy in the barrel of a soldier’s rifle: can anyone out there find a copy of that classic black & white image??