Let's Keep The Party Polite

I went to see the legendary Ravi Shankar last night at the San Francisco Opera House. George Harrison described Ravi as "the Godfather of World Music." On stage with him was his gifted, cool, beautiful daughter, Anoushka, who is a sitar genius in her own right.

Seeing Ravi takes me back to my adolescence. As a teenager, I was mesmerized by the Indian music that the Beatles brought to its audiences. In New Jersey, I begged my mother for the $200 to buy a sitar at the 4th Street Music Store in Greenwich Village. Even Dylan bought his guitar picks there. I played and played that thing until after an interminable two months, I felt I was ready for public performance. Never mind that I used a flat pick (that's very gauche) or
that a guru in New York told me it was required of a serious student to learn how to sing all of the literature in Indian music in a sort of solfeggio. That takes about seven years. Only then you may pick up an instrument. Seven years? You gotta be kidding.

I was ready now. I got my hands on a Manhattan Yellow Pages and called every Indian and Pakistani restaurant in the directory and asked if they needed a sitar player. Believe it or not, after only about forty toll calls, a man on the phone said in a thick East Indian accent that
I should come see him.

I actually got hired at the age of 16 to play the sitar on weekend nights at the Kohinoor Pakistani Restaurant on 2nd Avenue on the Lower East Side. Yes, with the flat pick and made-up melodies that sounded, well, Indian. I would wear a Nehru shirt and black dress shoes. All
these years later, I still marvel at the nerve of that 16-year old. I think I lasted four or five weeks.

"My sister-in-law does not like you and does not think you are very good," the Kohinoor owner explained apologetically. (Cherchez le sister-in-law.) "Perhaps you could learn 'Never on Sunday.' It was Number One on the Hit Parade in Karachi." I went home, learned "Never
on Sunday," played it in the restaurant the next week about twenty five times a night and got fired.

It's one of my favorite memories.

I got to meet Ravi Shankar twice, in the Greeen Room at Lincoln Center. On the second occasion, I stood in line behind The Young Rascals -- also Jersey boys -- who meekly requested sitar lessons from the master. Shankar politely -- even gently -- turned them down.

These memories were keeping me company as I took my box seat, expecting a lovely, meditative evening. No so fast. I forgot that San Francisco in many ways has become the Honyak capital of The Coast? And what is a "Honyak"? I'm not sure -- but I know what a lummox is. He was seated in front of me -- wreaking of dope and patchouli -- tweaking and squirming in his box seat all through the performance. He actually waved his glass of cheap red wine in the direction of the musicians and played "air sitar" along with the master. No respect for the "Godfather of World Music." Wordsworth came to mind, "The world is too much with us, late and soon." I was distracted from the concert and my childhood remembrances, of course, and kept fantasizing about how I could nail this inebriated jackass into a box of his own. Even at this stage -- Ravi Shankar turned 85 last month -- do people not have a clue that Ustad Ravi
Shankar and his colleagues, Anoushka, and the great Tanmoy Bose on tabla, provide serious classical music? Does anyone play "air cello" along with Yo-Yo Ma? These days, they probably do.

I mentioned this annoyance to an usher. She said, "These are not opera people here tonight. Opera people do not wave their wine glasses around."

Well, it could be tolerated during the drinking song in "La Traviata."

In a related item, I see that Judith Martin aka "Miss Manners" -- the official arbiter of good behavior -- is appearing before the Commonwealth Club but not in San Francisco. She come only as far as Mountain View, 35 miles south of San Francisco, at the Finn Center, on Tuesday, May 17. I wonder if anyone can do "air protocol."

Your Servant in San Francisco,

Bellingham