"WHAT DO YOU SAY TO A NAKED LADY?" Allen Funt

In 1970 Candid Camera's Allen Funt secretly filmed people's reactions to unexpected encounters with nudity in unusual situations, such as when a naked young woman casually exits an elevator.  He titled his movie, WHAT DO YOU SAY TO A NAKED LADY?  In more that fifty years of going into peoples homes to take care of their pianos I've had a number of such encounters.  I have yet to come up with a good answer to Allen Funt's question.

My first encounter was back in the days when the World was deemed a safer place and young children were permitted to answer the door.  I rang a door bell and a little girl answered.  I asked if her mommy was home.  She motioned  me to follow her.  Mommy was indeed home....IN THE BATHTUB!  I resolved never to follow a child into a house again.

Another encounter occurred when I arrived at a rural residence on a sunny summer day.  As I got out of my car, after coming up a long gravel driveway, a female voice called out, "I'm in the yard by the pool."  It was there that I found my customer sunbathing in the nude. Embarrassed she explained that she had forgotten her appointment with me, but, was expecting her sister.  When she heard my car she thought I was her sibling.

At one point I was training a young apprentice who was studying for the ministry at an ultra conservative Bible college.  My customer's college aged daughter answered the door and then went out to the pool where some of her friends were waiting.  The picture window, where the piano was situated, overlooked the pool.  After a while she and her friends stripped off their clothes and went skinny dipping in the pool.  She either forgot we could see them for the window, or, simply didn't care.  My Bible college apprentice just kept muttering, "This is Evil!  Evil!  Evil!"  I think I was more amused by his reaction than the goings on around the pool.

I've tuned pianos at nudist resorts, burlesque houses, strip clubs, and legitimate theaters doing nude productions, but, in such instances, one is more or less, prepared.  It's the surprises that leave you fumbling for words.

OF LIGHTHOUSES AND BOATS

A college economics professor I know likes to teach his students that free enterprise is not the answer to all situations.  Government intervention is sometimes necessary.  He often poses this question to his students: "Who, for profit, would build a lighthouse?"  Well, one of my piano tuning clients might well be just the person.  After all, he did build a boat in his basement.  A boat that was too large to ever exit the basement.  A boat that was never meant to set sail.  Why was it built? 

My client, who wishes to remain nameless, got hooked on the hobby of woodworking after taking a wood shop class in high school.  Hectic days at his law office were followed by relaxing evenings turning raw lumber into tables, chairs, cabinets, bookshelves, patio furniture, and just about anything else his family and friends desired. Often he would show me around his well equipped basement work shop to view his latest project, or, point out the differences between a table saw and a radial arm saw. He owned numerous woodworking machines and scores of hand tools. However, after more than forty years he ran out of projects.

Many times, while vacationing at the New Jersey seashore, he had noticed the many older boats made totally of wood.  The more modern fiberglass boats lacked the style and charm of their wooden predecessors, not to mention the meticulous craftsmanship.  Although he himself was not a boater, he obtained a set of plans to build a vintage sport fishing vessel.  Although it was a small boat it would still be too large to fit thru any of the exits from his basement.  He considered building it outdoors with an eye towards eventually selling it, but, the reality was that most of his spare time was in the later evening, so, daylight would become an issue as well as weather.  Also, he loved using his machines and wanted the project to be conveniently located near them.  Finally, due to their high maintenance, few sportsmen wanted wooden boats.  He decided it would be a labor of love, a work of art, and, it would be built in his basement.

Each time I visited to service his piano, I was treated to a trip downstairs to view the latest progress on the boat.  It was a slow moving, but, impressive undertaking. After about a year and a half  the boat was finished.  He never named it or christened it.  He did, however, prove it would float by filling the hull with water and letting it set a few days.  No leaks were detected.  The water was bailed out of the hull using buckets.  The boat sat in the basement for many years until he retired and the house was listed for sale.  Sadly, the vessel was sawed into pieces and hauled to the municipal dump.  He sold the contents of his workshop and he and his wife bought a small home at the seashore.  In time he may build that lighthouse.

ABOUT THAT SAFETY PIN?

When Peter Falk played the relentless detective Columbo, his character examined even the smallest detail. If Columbo encountered a corpse with a safety pin stuck thru the chest area of a perfect dress shirt, it surly would have raised his suspicion. He would never have rested until he had the answer to the question: what about the safety pin? This is a true story, not a TV script, and only I knew the significance of the safety pin.
It all started when a long time customer called me to tune his piano on a Wednesday afternoon. On Wednesday morning he telephoned me to say that he had been out of work and had just been called for a job interview that afternoon. Rather than cancel on me, he would leave the front door unlocked and my check on the piano. I was to let myself in.
When I opened his front door and entered the foyer he was dead, hanging by his neck from some clothesline rope attached to an upstairs hallway banister. A chair, he had apparently stood on and kicked aside, lay sideways on the floor. He was wearing dress slacks and a pastel dress shirt, both crisply pressed. A piece of notebook style paper was pined to the chest of the shirt with a hundred dollar bill taped to it and a message to me written in large blue letters, probably from a marking pen. The note said something like: Dear John. My wife is away. I did not want her to be the one to find me. Please call the police. Thanks. P.S. The money is for the tuning which you don't have to do plus some extra for your trouble. At that time the fee for a piano tuning was $35.00 so he was paying me almost triple.
I did not panic and run away for various reasons. For starters, this was not the first dead body I had ever encountered in my years of going into thousands of homes. It was about the third or forth. Second, two members of my family were homicide detectives and I knew from hearing them talk shop that the person who finds the body gets the honor of being the first suspect. Even if you are absolved form any involvement in the death, a coroner's inquest will tie up days of your time. So the thing to do was get out of the house with no clue that I was ever there. This meant the note had to go with me. I reached out to unpin the note, but, could not bring myself to deal with the pin, which would have meant touching the deceased. Instead, I tore the note from the pin. It came off clean leaving only the pin in the shirt. I made one more vain attempt to get the pin too, but, lost my nerve. I left the house making sure to leave the front door wide open.
This happened in the days before cell phones. I drove to the nearest pay phone and called the police claiming to be a concerned neighbor. I told them the door on the house across the street was wide open and I knew the owners were away. I also thought I saw men walking around inside. I hastily gave the address and hung up. I drove to a bakery, got a much needed cup of coffee, and drove back by the house about twenty minutes later to make sure the police had arrived. They had. For months I worried about that safety pin I left behind, or, if the deceased had written down the day and time of my appointment on a calender or something, but, nothing ever came of it. I guess there were no "Columbos" in that police department.
EPILOGUE: Many months later the deceased man's wife called me to help her sell the piano. Of course, I acted surprised to hear about her husband's demise. I asked if he had been ill or involved in an accident? She told me that he had taken his own life because he was depressed over the fact that his company had let him go, and, as an older man, no one seemed to want to hire him, despite his years of experience. She ventured that he had sent out hundreds of resumes. She told me that between his severance package, and what they had saved for retirement, he really had no need to worry about ever working again. There is a great difference between need and want.

"QUEEN ELIZABETH" MEETS "CHASE UTLEY" OVER A CHEESESTEAK

Often, when tuning pianos in the Italian Market district of South Philadelphia, I would treat myself to a cheesesteak at GENO'S to wind up my night.  Joey Vento, an iconic Philadelphia character claimed to have started his eatery in 1966 with only fifteen dollars in his pocket and built it into a ten million dollar a year business.  Over the years, as South Philadelphia evolved from being a primarily Italian neighborhood, to a multi-cultural melting pot, Joey Vento grew irritated with those who refused to make English their primary language as his family had. Around 2007 Joey posted a sign at the counter at GENO'S which read: " THIS IS AMERICA.  WHEN ORDERING PLEASE SPEAK ENGLISH."   Many people thought the sign to be racist and the Philadelphia city fathers launched a campaign to force Vento to remove the sign.  Joey refused, and the legal battle raged on for years with Joey Vento emerging the winner.  The sign remains to this day. During the course of the controversy the press coverage grew to international proportions.  A woman from Manchester England followed the stories and came to admire Joey's grit. So it was that when she got to vacation in Philadelphia she waisted little time in making a visit to GENO'S

The night I arrived at GENO'S for my dinner I noticed a confused,middle aged, women dressed in a dark green dress with white pokadots, accessorized with white shoes, white handbag, and a white pill box hat.  It was her hat and heavy British accent that caused me to dub her "Queen Elizabeth."  I asked as to the cause of her distress and she told me she had not realized the menu of steak sandwiches was so extensive with numerous options.  She had no idea of what to order to be sure she had tasted an authentic Philly cheesesteak. Although it is not my personal favorite, I told her a steak with CHEEZ WHIZ and fried onions is what most Philly natives consider the classic.  As I walked her up to the order window I taught her how to order like a true Philadelphian. "One, wit, Whiz, here."  You should have heard it in her British accent!  I decided to keep her company as we sat at one of the outdoor picnic type tables and had our meal.  Somewhere from the depths of her over sized purse she managed to produce a knife and fork to eat her sandwich with.  If she thought I was a barbaric American eating with my hands, she never said.

As I was learning her reasons for dining at GENO'S a rowdy group of Phillies fans showed up wearing team caps and jerseys.  The Phillies had lost, and, as the fans waited on line for their steaks, the language grew rough and salty. The F word was flying!  My new friend from Manchester was becoming quite upset.  She commented that her nephew was a Rugby player back home, and, when his team lost a game they, "took it on the chin.  The did not behave like animals!"  It was then I realized that she thought the crowd on line was the actual Phillies team, not, fans in costume. I walked over to the folks on line and asked the fans to tone it down a notch or two because they were disgracing the team in the eyes of a visitor from England.  Surprisingly they complied.  Then, one man dressed in a Utley jersey approached our table hat in hand.  I caught his sly wink as he said "Pardon me lady, I'm Chase Utley, and I just want to apologise on behalf of the entire Phillies team.  Our behaviour was way out of line."  He put his cap back on and strode back to the rest of his group.  The "Queen" was charmed, and clearly, all was forgiven.

When I got home and relayed the incident to my wife she scolded me for not telling the lady the truth, that she had not really met the great second base player Chase Utley.  I, on the other hand, just smiled at the thought of the great tale she would have to tell the folks back in Manchester.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY THREESOME menage a trois

One warm spring afternoon I arrived at a client's home to tune her piano.  As I parked my car at the curb, a young blonde woman pulled up in a sporty red convertible and parked directly behind me.  As I got out of my car she exited hers.  As I walked up the front walk she walked a few paces behind me. When I arrived at the front door she stood next to me and asked if I were the man of the house.  I explained I was the piano tuner.  She smiled and said, "Are you going to ring the door bell or should I?" I rang.  My client opened the door.  Flustered and red faced she told the young women to head upstairs and explained to me that she had forgotten our appointment and it was her husband's birthday.  He had always fantasized about he and his wife having a threesome with a pretty young blondie.  His wife had arranged the menage a trois as his birthday present.  I offered to come back another time to tune the piano but my client brushed the idea off by saying, "You'll be downstairs and we'll be upstairs.  I'll pay you now and you can just let yourself out."  The three were fairly noisy so it was a very erotic piano tuning.  When I got home that evening I told my wife about the incident.  I prefaced with, "Honey, what were you thinking about for my birthday?"

THE AMERICAN DREAM

IF you are not from the Northeast Corridor, you may not recognize the gentleman pictured to the right. He was legendary Philadelphia radio talk show host, Irv Homer. At age 21 he was piloting B-17s for the Army Air Force and flew 15 bombing missions out of Italy. After the war, Irv held a number of jobs such as painting, wallpapering, and bar tending. He eventually owned two taverns, from which, he started calling into radio talk shows. He was a thoughtful and provocative caller. By the 1960's he was hired by a number of stations in the Philadelphia market as a talk show host. THE IRV HOMER SHOW became so popular that, by the mid 1970's, he joined powerhouse WWDB-FM radio, and later, also became a regular panelist on ABC's inside story on WPVI-TV. Somewhere along the way Irving Homer picked up the moniker, "Evil Irving." This was due to the fact that he was a truth telling iconoclast who called things as he saw them, political correctness be damned! His straight to the point manner probably kept his show from being Nationally syndicated. In reality Irving was far from being "evil" and gave selflessly to many causes and charities. In the mid 1980"s he died of a heart attack during an appearance at a local college. I had the pleasure of being on his program a number of times and working with him on some civic projects. Irv's success is a textbook example of "The American Dream." It is ironic, that in later life, Irv often said, "The American Dream works for everyone but Americans!"

IRV defined Americans as white Anglo-Saxons who believe in an "I got mine, you get yours" philosophy. Who live above their means via credit cards. Who worship sports and leisure activities. "The Romans knew it, give them bread and circuses," Irv would shout into his microphone. He often waxed eloquently on how other cultures in America focus on family unity. How they work endless hours at multiple low paying jobs to achieve a better life for their children. How they do without to buy the best education. How they help one another start their own business. I have seen many examples of what Irv was talking among my piano tuning clients. Following are a few:

A Korean doctor, I tune for, works for free at a cousin's produce store several nights a week, to save his cousin labor costs until the new business takes hold. Few patrons know a general surgeon is trimming their produce.

I had tuned the piano for a Chinese girl since she was five. In her senior year of high school she asked me my opinion of some colleges she was considering attending as a classical music major. I told her it was extremely difficult to make it as a concert pianist, especially for a female. I recommended making music her minor and majoring in something she could actually make a living at. She explained that she had no need to earn money. Her entire family, siblings, parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, had chipped in for a trust fund that would support her modestly for many years to come. She could afford to play mostly benefits. Any monies she might sometimes earn would be extra. "Why would they do such a thing," I asked? She replied, "Just for the bragging rights of having a concert pianist in the family."

A couple from India who lived in the back room of their donut shop made sure their young children had piano lessons and a well tuned piano to practice on. They lived in the back of the store for years, until they expanded their business to three locations. Later, they bought a mansion in one of the premier communities in my area. The house is expensively furnished. Several luxury cars grace the circular driveway. I now tune their Steinway grand.

I work mostly at night since few people will take a day off from work to have a piano tuned. In most homes, that are not Anglo-Saxon, I usually find the entire family gathered around the dining room table doing school work. Older kids help the younger. Dad and mom aid and encourage all. Usually all the children take music lessons. TV, video games, and sports activities are minimal.
Dad does not come home from work and crash on the sofa. Children do not hide out in their rooms. Everyone eats dinner together. Evil Irving would contend that these families are living the real American Dream.

THEY JUST CALL ME RAY

I met Ray Charles on three occasions. Twice I tuned pianos for his concerts, and once a family friend, who is a private pilot, flew him to an engagement and invited me along for the ride. I almost wished I had stayed home when Ray, despite the fact that he was blind, asked if he could fly the plane for a bit and my friend let him take the controls! My most vivid memory of Ray Charles, however, involves a showdown with a famous maestro, who, due largely to modesty, asked me not to mention him by name. The maestro was to conduct a large orchestra that was performing a tribute to Ray's music and Ray was appearing as the featured soloist. On some songs both Ray, and the maestro, would be playing two Steinway pianos in duets. I tuned both instruments. When I was finished the maestro and Ray sat down at their respective pianos to make certain they were satisfied with the harmony of the two Steinways together. Ray broke away form the regular score and played a sassy jazz riff. Acknowledging Ray's "challenge" the maestro played the same riff just as well and added a bit more to it. Ray responded by matching the maestro's performance and added yet more, upping the ante. What Ray didn't know, or, may have forgotten, is that prior to becoming an orchestra conductor, the maestro had a whole other career as a jazz pianist and had won many honors including DOWNBEAT MAGAZINE'S annual jazz poll and the famed Newport Jazz Festival. In fact he had won both several times! So it was that when Ray sent forth his next challenge from the keyboard the maestro, who had grown tired of the game, cut loose with an astonishing full keyboard multi arpeggio that contained elements of jazz, classical, blues, and whatever else flew out of his fingers at lightning speed. Ray just threw both his hands up in the air in surrender and shook his head. Ray's good natured comment was, "I guess that's why the call him maestro, and they just call me Ray."