Category — Miscellaneous

Nowhere Boy, the movie about John Lennon as a teenager, wasn’t that great.  But the setting was.

The movie was very soap opera–ish. Lennon and his mother seemed to be having an affair on screen.

My wife, Alice, wanted to see Nowhere Boy.  Or any movie.  We had a friend visiting from out of town.  The friend chose Nowhere Boy too.  Alice said the movie had 81 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

Eighty-one percent is horrible!  But I went, to be a sport.

Nowhere Boy is a drama set in 1950s Liverpool: double-decker buses, Morgans and Teddy Boys.   Yes!

Oh, to be in England . . .

[Please click video to continue:]

Bert Stratton is a pianist and singer on the Caribbean Princess cruise ship.

A man phoned and said, “Bert, this is Joe.  I’m upstairs.”

I was in the basement.  Joe was upstairs.  Creepy.

Joe was upstairs at the other Bert Stratton’s house.

A friend of mine saw Bert perform.  Bert knew me — knew of me — he told my friend.

I know Bert, sort of.  The imposter always tops me on Google.

I wouldn’t mind playing a cruise ship like Bert Stratton.  I know a retired rabbi — Bernard Ducoff, the father of Yiddishe Cup’s dance leader Daniel Ducoff — who does cruise ship gigs.  He’s the boat rabbi for a week or so.  Yiddishe Cup could do a Caribbean klezmer cruise.  There already is a Caribbean cantors cruise on Kosherica lines.  (Not fiction.)

I could not see doing a klezmer bus tour.  No thanks to blowing clarinet on a moving vehicle.  Bad for the teeth.  I was asked to play on Lolly the Trolley and said no.

I could play klezmer on an elevator.  I did.  Yiddishe Cup played elevator music at the opening of Stone Garden Center for Adult Living.  We have played at Stone Garden many times since, but not in the elevator.  We call our Stone Garden gigs “playing the Garden,” as in Madison Square Garden.

Has Bert Stratton ever played the Garden?
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2 of 2 posts for 8/25/10

Magic Markers must say “Sharpie Retractable Fine Point.”  The “Retractable” means there is no cap — nothing to unscrew and then laboriously screw onto the other end of the pen.

I ordered 24 red Sharpie retractables online because I couldn’t find a lone red Sharpie at Staples or Office Max.  Those places think you’re representing the entire Cuyahoga County juvenile court system when you walk in.

Pay close attention to the words “fine point” on the retractable Sharpie.  The “ultra fine point” model is nothing more than a pen.

I bought 7 pounds of 7-inch “Big Red” rubber bands from Netherland Rubber in Cincinnati.  The company wouldn’t sell less than 7 pounds.  That supply — my 7 pounds/1,260 rubber bands — lasted eight years.  If you purchase similar big rubber bands at Discount Drug Mart or Staples, you’ll pay $2 for 12 rubber bands — 17 cents per rubber band.  Mine, in bulk, were 3 cents.  The rubber bands are good for organizing manila-folder tax return files.  They’re also useful for organizing clothes in a duffel or backpack.

Pentel RSVP pens . . . You need a balanced pen like that. Use the RSVP fine point for detail work like bookkeeping, and the medium point for regular tasks.  The medium point moves quicker across the page than the fine point. Use Gel pens for the dramatic, inky, John Hancock-style, five-year lease signing.

For Post-its, pay extra and go Super Sticky.  Make sure you don’t accidentally buy the accordion-style, pop-up Post-its. That is a death sentence.

I wrote to a real estate newsletter: “The Post-it has simplified my life more than my computer!”  This was pre-Internet.  Now I’d take my computer over Post-its to a desert island.

Get a couple clip-on pens. Don’t buy them. Find somebody from the Cleveland Clinic to give you a couple. You need a clip-on pen (no cap) for quick accessibility. Sometimes a bandleader has to quickly write the name of a tune on an index card.  Nobody can hear anything on stage.

My father used 8-column green accounting pads for record keeping.  I still occasionally refer to his records, particularly the marginalia, like “Light the incinerator from the top floor down, so the refuse burns down.”

Incinerators were banned more than 40 years ago.

“In September have boilers bled and check safety valves.”

Check.

For checks, try J&R Computer Supply in Mankato, Minnesota . . .
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2 of 2 posts for 8/18/10

We interrupt this blog to tell you this blog is a year old.

Special thanks to our major donors (commenters).  We could have done it without you, but it wouldn’t have been as interesting.

In no particular order, thanks to Marc, Jessica Schreiber, Gerald Ross, Robert K S, Shawn Fink, Teddy, Adrianne Greenbaum, Bill Jones, Mark Schilling, Harvey Kugelman, Wolf Krawkowski, Terri Zupancic, Ellen . . .

David, Irwin Weinberger, John M. Urbancich, Jane Lassar, Zach, Gary Gould, Robin, Ben Cohen, David Budin, Alice, Alan Douglass, Diddle, Don Friedman, Kenny G, Richard Grayson and Steven Greenman.

Get your name on this list next year by contributing at least $2,500, or writing in a lot.

Google Analytics — a spy op — has uncovered Klezmer Guy readers in every state except the axis of evil: South Dakota, Nebraska and Arkansas.  Google also hears Klezmer Guy “chatter” from many foreign countries.  The most active Klezmer Guy cells are in Canada, Israel, England, France and Germany.  And there is a lone-wolf reader in Libya. ( Salaam, bro, don’t shoot.)

Google doesn’t divulge readers’ names, by the way,  just cities and countries.

Expect some Klezmer Guy video this coming year.  These video clips should appeal to a broader readership: non-readers.  Some nudity in the clips. (Facial and hand.)

***

Quiz-time

Several Klezmer Guy readers  report: “I’ve read every word of your blog!”   Kathy, one of these extreme readers, has asked for a quiz.  She thinks she will win.

[The quiz is now in the “comments” section of this post. 5/21/10]

See you at the next Yiddishe Cup concert or “Driving Mr. Klezmer” duo gig.  Or if not there, here.

The bell rings.  Round two.

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2 of 2 posts for 5/12/10

1. WHAT YOU CALL HIM

When I wrote to John Demjanjuk’s daughter, she sent me a packet stating her father, the Ukrainian SS man, had been framed by an editor at a small pro-Soviet, anti-Ukrainian, New York newspaper in 1975.

I was interested in seeing Demjanjuk.  I had thought and dreamed about Nazis, but had never been in the same room with one.  (I usually dreamed about being in the same room.)

At the 1981 Demjanjuk trial, lawyers argued over forensics, among other things, at the federal courthouse in Cleveland. I looked on as the prosecution presented a handwriting expert who had studied over 4,000 signatures.  He said Demjanjuk’s signature on the prison guard ID card was the real thing, not a Soviet forgery.

The judge agreed on that and a few other things — after months of testimony — and revoked Demjanjuk’s citizenship.

Demjanjuk then spent some time in various American prisons for technical violations, such as missing his first deportation hearing.

In 1986 Demjanjuk was sent to Israel for a second trial.

A cop at the Sixth District police station watched a small TV hidden under his desk that day.  The TV was always on.  (I was covering the police news.)  The cop said, “Hey, there’s that guy — What You Call Him — getting off the plane in Israel.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t take a pill,” I said.

“For what?  He didn’t do it.”

“There are five witnesses,” I said.

“So what. It’s the past.  Let it die.  But the fucking Jews keep bringing it up.  He didn’t do it.  He was told to, or else.”

A lieutenant interrupted, “What would you do if somebody put a gun to your head and said, ‘Do it or else’?”

“He didn’t have to do it,” I shrugged.  I was down for the count with F-ing Jews.

Israel convicted Demjanjuk, and he was in an Israeli prison for years. Then Israel’s high court overturned its verdict on various technicalities and sent him back to America.

When Demjanjuk returned to the States, he went on trial again in Cleveland and was ordered deported.  Nobody wanted him until last year, when Germany said yes.

Demjanjuk turns 90 this Saturday in a German prison hospital.

Dem john’s luck.

Dem john yuck.

Damn john’s junket . . . Kiev Oblast, Flossenberg, Trawniki, Treblinka, Sobibor, Seven Hills/Cleveland, Jerusalem, Munich.

***

2. VOLKSDEUTSCHE

The building across from St. Edward High has two hair salons — one specializing in fades and buzzes, and the other for elderly women, all about perms and tints.

The tint shop is Martha’s.  In 1977 she bought the business from Hildegard, a fellow German. Martha is Volksdeutsche, an ethnic German from Poland.

Sometimes Martha sits in her shop all day and doesn’t get a single customer.  Her clientele is dwindling.  Whenever I come in, she hugs me and cries. This happens every single time.

She always talks about Jews.  Poles, too, occasionally.  She is not, as a rule, fond of Poles. “Every group has its devils, but the Poles had more than most,” she says.  She mentions several East Side Jews who hired her when she came over in the 1950s.  “Wonderful, wonderful people.”

I don’t know these East Side Jews.  Some West Side gentiles think all East Side Jews know each other.

I wonder how much of Martha’s war saga is true.

Martha is often late with her rent. That’s a pain but not a major one.  She’s good for it.

I hope her war stories are all true, but I don’t really want to know if they aren’t.

Martha says her mother rescued a Jewish girl in Kutno, Poland, during the war.  Martha’s mother — along with her Uncle Wilhelm and Cousin Hedwig — saw the little girl at a train station, exchanged furtive glances with the girl’s mom, took the girl home, and raised her.  The girl wound up marrying an Englishman after the war, Martha says.

Martha had Jewish ancestors who converted to Lutheranism in the 1800s, she says.

When my wife’s computer started whirring and stinking up the house, I told her not to worry.  It would correct itself.

It crashed.  No biggie.   She got a new computer.

Then my violinist’s computer crashed.   It was a laptop he carried on every trip.  It was like a Strad to him.  A Stradivarius.  Three days after the crash, he was back online.  No big deal.

My computer crashed.

Big deal. I went nuts.

My real estate data disappeared.  I lost five years of checkbook data.

My computer repairman was dead; he was killed in a freak bicycle accident.  And my back-up computer guy was in medical school — in Hungary.  I couldn’t even write a check, and I didn’t know my bank balance.

I called Quickbooks and got a technician from the Pacific time zone.  Pacific Coast people, they seem smart on the phone. The tech person found the problem — after three hours of phone jabber — and fixed it for $172.  I would have paid triple that.

From yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:  “Triggers for broken-heart syndrome seem as varied as the number of people affected . . . Being overwhelmed by new software at work, seeing a poultry barn burn down, or losing money at a casino all have brought the condition on, doctors say.” The article’s headline was “Hearts Can Actually Break.”

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2 of 2 posts for 2/10/10

Clarinet players are sometimes a bit behind the times. If you subscribe to The Clarinet magazine, you’ll see.  There are a lot of photos.

Toodles in ’12. Benny Goodman for President.

Many clarinetists, myself included, mimic Goodman.  He’s the latest thing.  We stand ram-rod straight, wear suits, and have facial muscles twisted tighter than model airplane propellers.

U.S. military band clarinetists are a subspecies of clarinet antediluvians.  They are all sergeants for some reason.  These soldiers aren’t shimmying under any barbed wire fences for you.  They’re busy practicing, trying to get into The Clarinet magazine.

Clarinetists gather annually at Clarinetfest, Clarinetopia and Clarabell.  (The last one is made up.)  At these conventions, the workshop leaders are called clinicians.  They come from SMU, KSU and OSU.  Has to have an S in it.  The clinicians teach college students how to become clinicians.

When I was a clinician at the Ohio Music Educators Association conference, I was a bit light in the bio department. No “B.M. from SMU,” no “soloed with the Wyoming Symphony,” no “studied with Hans WorseThan Most.”

I wrote I was the clarinetist and leader of Yiddishe Cup.

***

Not every clarinet player looks like an insurance agent.  There’s Don Byron, the black guy with dreadlocks, and Paquito D’Rivera, the Cubano humano. Plus there are at least a dozen curly-haired Jewish clarinetists who look like Larry Fine from the Three Stooges.  The principal clarinetist of the Cleveland Orchestra, Franklin Cohen, is a Larry Fine impersonator.  Me too.

A black acquaintance, who ran into me in a restaurant, said, “Hi, Frank.”  I corrected him, and the black man blushed, sort of.

I played two surprise birthday parties for Frank Cohen.  Those were scary affairs because at least eight clarinet players were at each gig.  Some of the clarinetists played “Happy Birthday” in a clarinet choir, which is similar to a vocal chorus, except it’s all clarinets: big, medium and little clarinets.

I, too, own a small clarinet — a C clarinet.  The C is more piercing than the standard Bb horn, which is my main axe. (Bb is what everybody is familiar with.) There are also Eb clarinets, which are smaller than Cs.  And even more obscure key clarinets.

The thing I never understood about music: Why all the different keys?  Just get rid of some of them. Pare down.

Sid Beckerman, the legendary klez clarinetist, said, “To you, D minor is a key.  To me, it’s a living.”  D minor is the key of choice for klezmer clarinetists.

And what’s with transposing? If a clarinetist plays with a pianist or guitarist, the clarinet player has to play different notes than the ones written on the page.

I’m pretty good at it.  When I see a written “C,” I can play “D” on the clarinet.  It took me a while.  It’s like a Swede learning Danish.

Here’s what is impossible: transposing quickly on the alto sax.  When you see “C,” you play “A,” the relative minor.  If the tune is incredibly slow, like a waltz, it’s doable.

Transposition keeps the riff-raff and dabblers off the bandstand.  Just like in Judaism, where the prayer book goes backwards and the rabbi skips chunks of prayers and jumps around in the book without telling you.  Just to make it hard.

 Most artists prefer to practice and wait for the phone to ring.

When I started out in klez, a Cleveland Irish musician, Dermot Somerville, told me: “You need to remind people you’re alive at least every six months.”

I do — X 26. As you know.

Yiddishe Cup is one of the most popular klezmer bands, because:

(1.) We’re good.

(2.) We promote ourselves.

I learned item #2 , and the chutzpah to say item #1, from my dad, who was not a WASP-modest George “Poppy” Bush kind of guy. My father said if you don’t toot your own horn, nobody will.  When my father was at the hospital dying of leukemia, he told the doctor, “I own this place.”  My dad owned a Cleveland Clinic municipal bond.

I used to be shy.  So was my father.  He took a Dale Carnegie course on public speaking.   In my twenties, I was still shy; I heard a West Side hardware store owner say “jew down,” and it took me 20 minutes to sputter, “Bob, you know I’m Jewish.”  (My family spent about $500 a month in that store. I figured Bob would be open to my viewpoint.)

Bob didn’t know “jew down” had anything to do with real Jews.  He apologized.  He was a decent guy.
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2 of 2 posts for 12/23/09

My real estate job is pretty easy physically. I just boss custodians and repairmen around  and do paperwork: pay taxes, pay cockroach killers, and argue about security deposit refunds.  The only physical part is climbing the stairs and going on roofs.  None of my buildings has elevators.

Playing the clarinet . . . that can injure you.  You know where?  The right thumb.  The right thumb holds a disproportionate weight when you’re standing.

I had a pain in my right thumb that lasted 18 months.  The pain took a long leisurely trip through my body. Went from my thumb to my shoulders to my neck.

Physical therapists love musicians, particularly violinists, flutists, pianists and clarinetists.

I drove to Cincinnati to see a specialist for clarinet pain.  Then I did Alexander Technique, and every other technique short of amputation.

Some clarinet players use a neck strap. I do.  At KlezKamp, the music conference, I met a clarinetist who wore a neck strap.  He said, “The pain eventually goes away.”  That was my mantra for more than a year.

The clarinet is the agony stick.  Musicians call it that.  Not simply because the clarinet can be painful to play, but because it’s difficult.  The fingerings are harder than the sax, and a clarinet has the “break,” the awkward leap from A to B in the middle register.  The clarinet squeaks.  And the clarinet’s register key raises the note a twelfth, not an octave.  This is extremely odd physics.  The clarinet’s sound doesn’t typically come out the bell, like on a sax.

You mic a sax by clipping a mic on the bell, but on a clarinet you surround the clarinet with mics like on Wagon Train.  I had a mic rig for my clarinet that was so complex and heavy — and cost more than my axe — I  gave up on it.  Plus, it was hurting my thumb.

I asked a sax player in a big band if he played clarinet.  He said, “I have a clarinet.”
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1 of 2 posts for 9/30/09.  Please see the post below too.
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A version of this post will appear in the upcoming (Dec. 2009) issue of The Clarinet, the magazine of the International Clarinet Association, www.clarinet.org.
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Apparently some people don’t know there is a comments section to this blog.  Click on the “comments” link  below the “Tell A Friend” link. If there are few, or no, comments, go to the end of the “Sanctuary” post — two down from here. There are a lot of comments there.

Wedding clients never forget you. You’re in their video.

When I run into an old wedding client, he says, “Abigail and Isaac, this is Mr. Stratton.  He played Mommy and Daddy’s wedding.”

I say to the kids, “You weren’t there.”   (I’m not good with kid chat.)

Some of these weddings were 15-20 years ago.

In real estate, that kind of long-term psychic pay-off  is minimal.  Last decade I got a letter from a recovering alcoholic who said I saved her life when I kicked her out of her apartment for being drunk and not paying her rent.

I’ve rented to a lot of drunks.  The “not paying her rent” part had been the problem.

I’m an official “old guy” now. An arts agency made a documentary about roots music in Ohio, and a bunch of  baby-boomers, including me, was the subject.  We were the old fogies on the porch picking away at authentic instruments.  Meanwhile, my “old guys” — Muddy Waters, Dave Tarras, Mickey Katz — are dead.

I saw a 92-year-old piano player recently.  He wasn’t dead.

I still get nervous when I play.  Good, I’m not dead.

I played at Nighttown, a local club, for the “old guy” DVD-release party.  Something like my 1,028th Yiddishe Cup gig.  I played “Nelika” in 7/16 and stopped halfway through it.  I didn’t take the repeat.  Man, I was playing it in 9/16 or 10/16.  I was so ahead of the game.  I was freaked out by my fellow musicians in the room.

Always good to be nervous. Me and nervous go way back.  My first couple recitals at Victory Park elementary school were debacles.  I had memorized the tunes and then forgot where I was.  Let’s take it from the top again, shall we? Those grade-school gigs are hot-stamped on my brain.  Worse, a violinist prodigy always followed me.  Philip Setzer.  He wound up in the Emerson String Quartet.

[For goys only: “A.K.” in this post’s title stands for alter kocker (old cocker).  An A.K. is anybody 10 years older than you.]
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Tomorrow:
No more of  these “tomorrow” teasers.

Not too many sidemen care about the contract.  They just want to know their cut.  And that’s the way it should be.  The sidemen aren’t dealing with the kvetching bar mitzvah moms and uptight brides.  And they aren’t having meetings at their houses discussing whether the bride is going to circle the groom or not.  (The bride often circles the groom seven times at a Jewish wedding.)  Or is the dad going to do the welcome toast before or after the challah blessing?

I always try to get paid at the gig — take the client over to a corner table and have him sign the check. I get at least a double portion for being the bandleader. Why?  Because Yiddishe Cup is not just a club-date band. (Club date means private party band.)   Yiddishe Cup is a concert-playing band that rehearses and has ongoing expenses — like advertising and travel expenses.  And I want to recoup that.

In Cleveland if a top-flight musician gets $200 per night, he’s happy.  That’s $50 an hour.  I pay my guys more.
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Tomorrow:
AT THE A.K. LODGE . . . Where the old guys hang out.

The band biz is a fraction of the real estate money, but the time commitment is about the same.  And as for the psychic payoff, the band is several times higher than the real estate biz.  Nobody is going to give you credit — at least long-lasting credit — for fixing a toilet.  Nobody is going to write on your tombstone: “This guy provided heat for many apts.”

The real estate biz — that is humble stuff.  The arts — one big ego trip.  My dad said that.  He was probably right.  Where did he come up with the word ego?   That wasn’t his style.

Right after I started Yiddishe Cup, in 1988, I told the Cleveland Jewish News, “We’re not in it for fame and fortune.”

That lasted about six months.  After our first concert, we began dining regularly at The Big Ego, which is next to The Big Egg, W. 51^st Street and Detroit Avenue.  Figuratively speaking.
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Tomorrow:
The Yiddishe Cup Fight Song . . . Go Cup Go

When you’ve done more than a thousand gigs, you can safely tell the brides’ moms what’s what.  Only once in a while will you run into a “play this, play that” mom.   Or  “My sister wants to sing.  Don’t let her!  And why are you taking a break right now?”  Micro-managers.  Don’t they have anything better to do on the big day?

All in all, simcha (weddings and bar mitzvahs) work is pure pleasure. Most everybody is there to have a good time, and you can sound awful and nobody will notice.  You can even rehearse new tunes on the bandstand.  As long as you play “Sunrise Sunset” — or don’t play it, as the case may be — everybody is happy.
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Tomorrow:
PULL THE TRIGGER . . . Make the Deal.  Do it.

Instrument cases, they’re like coffins. Red velvet.  Often musty.  Occasionally mildewy.

A clarinet is a chopped-up piece of African granadilla wood, stained black.  It’s just a big wooden flute with a lot of hardware.  It takes a minimum of seven years’ practice to sound decent.  Kids sound horrible on clarinets.

When some schmuck calls and yells at me about no heat, I just fire up my clarinet.

You need gigs, or you’ll quit practicing.  Playing for oneself, that lasts only about six months. I hung with a community band once; the conductor ranted at us like we weren’t good enough to park cars at Severance Hall [home of the Cleveland Orchestra].  I dropped out.

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Tomorrow:
TWO GUYS JAMMIN’. . . Fritz Kreisler and Fritz the Cat.

One day you’re a real estate slumlord, and the next you’re signing autographs at a concert.  The first time I signed an autograph, I couldn’t fathom it.  I am not Bob Feller.

About 10 percent of CD-buyers want your autograph.

They are the well-wishers after the gig.  “Great concert” is the standard greeting.  Some of these people try to hog the musicians’ time with stories about their grandkids’ clarinet playing, or their memories of Mickey Katz – which is actually interesting.

Sometimes I’m the autograph hound. I was talking to Josh Dolgin (Socalled) of Klezmer Madness after a concert — and I know the guy, I mean he has stayed at my house — when a concertgoer cut in front of me and started flashing his business card, and I backed off.  I was looking forward to going out for a drink with Dolgin maybe.  Who knows.  Maybe David Krakauer, the star of the show, would have come along.

Instead I went to a coffeehouse with Irwin Weinberger, Yiddishe Cup’s guitar player,  and we rehashed the Klezmer Madness show.  We decided Krakauer was a clarinet player beyond belief, but 90 minutes of non-stop clarinet — no matter how good — was too long.

Keep it 30 minutes or under.  We’re in a hurry.  We grew up on Sesame Street.  (Howdy Doody in my case.)

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Tomorrow:
PO-PO AS RENTER . . . The police pay on time.

I had my clarinet’s tone holes undercut, which means the clarinet repairman shaved some wood out of the clarinet’s bore.  Repairman . . . technician . . . the guy was my neighbor.  He spends his workday looking down clarinets and saxophones.  Like a coal miner.  He has a little light he drops down the clarinet shaft, looking for leaks.

So my axe has a very wide-open sound.  You can put a lot of air through it.  That’s the trick — to put as much air through as possible.  (The champ of  “big air” is Gary Gould from Los Angeles.   He’s plays a Claude Lakey 4* jazz clarinet mouthpiece — a loud and uncontrollable thing, like a two year old in a restaurant.)

But it’s not all about the bike, or horn.  The player needs to maintain a thin stream of air, like blowing a Superball across a table.  Not a golf ball or ping pong ball.   It has to be a Superball.  (Ilene Stahl used the Superball analogy at KlezKamp two decades ago.)

On a sax, you can put tons of air through because the physics of the sax are different than the clarinet.  All the sound of a sax comes out the bell; on a clarinet, only a bit of the sound comes out the bell, and the rest pops out the fingering holes.  There is a reverse air pressure on the clarinet.  Air coming back at you.

In the real estate biz the “back pressure” is water leaks.  Property management is all about water problems — roof  leaks, pipes bursting, or some guy flushing potatoes down his toilet.

I have a trio of plumbers: Ron, who goes in with a pneumatic pump.  If that doesn’t unclog the drain, we go to Bob, who has an electric snake.  He’s picky, though;  for example, he’ll say, “I’m not going in there.  There’s a ton of feces and the guy is a fat slob.”  If  Bob can’t — or won’t — fix the mess, we go with Bill, who charges 50 percent more than Bob and has a howitzer in his truck.

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Tomorow:
NEXT STOP PINSK . . . How to run your band like a train.

For our D.C. gig, the hotel wanted to see our band’s liability insurance policy.  We didn’t have one.  Same request came from a temple in Boca Raton, Fla.  Must be an East Coast thing — the band must have an insurance policy.  In the Midwest nobody sues anybody else.  We’ve had a couple broken ankles over the years — people falling in “Hava Nagila”s, or getting spiked by another dancer’s high heel.  Stuff happens.  But nobody sues.

Contracts are almost meaningless.  If there’s no trust, you’re wasting your time.  Who you going to take to small claims?  I’ve done a couple rounds.  Maybe one a decade.  Not for the band, the real estate.  Only do small claims when you know the person is collectible.  Like when they work for the Cleveland Clinic.  Even then, the person might quit his job when he gets the garnishment letter from you.

Best to check out the person on the way in — not the way out.  Call the previous landlord if you have to.  Run a credit check.  If the previous landlord says the guy is a psycho, believe him.  And refuse to comment when the prospective tenant asks, “What did my landlord say to kill the deal?”  Be glad the landlord leveled with you.  Often the previous landlord will mislead you just to get the psycho out of his building.

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Shabbat shalom
Tomorrow:
THE CLARINET SHAFT . . . How to make a clarinet sound decent.

Never take less than the equivalent of two months’ rent on move in. If a person can’t pay that, you’ll be chasing that person from the get-go.

I once had a custodian who took a ring instead of a security deposit. The renter was an elderly retired nurse from Houston. Also, a felon. But we didn’t know that. She conned her way into the apartment with a dime store ring.

I did a little “self-help” — legal-talk for evicting her without the court’s permission. I got a couple guys, and we moved her stuff into the basement. Her lawyer took several thousand from me. That was my last self-help.

I’m not “mom and pop” — I have a layer between me and the tenants: my on-site building managers/custodians.

How did I get to be bigger than “mom and pop.” First off, it helped my father was Toby Stratton. He bought a six-store, 21-suiter in 1965. He put down 8 percent and got two second mortgages. That’s heavy leverage. Gambling.

The band biz — we’re not “mom and pop” either. “Mom and pop” in the music biz would be a bar band — $100 per night per guy. Yiddishe Cup is above that. We’ve played the soft-seat auditoriums. That’s what the music biz calls the college auditoriums with cushy chairs.

For example, we played Loras College in Iowa and ate at the Ground Round afterward — the only place in Dubuque that was open after 10 p.m.

We’ve played Mt. Union College, Beloit College, Michigan State, UNC-Greensboro, Chautauqua Institution, City of El Paso (Tex.), Kenyon, Wabash, Cottey College in Nevada, Missouri. That’s the gateway to the Ozarks. A lot of places.