Credit where credit is due

I've just been in Facebook contact with the guy responsible for me becoming a Navy musician.

David Lewis and I were freshman together at Ithaca College, 1966-67. These were not years of widespread academic stability and accomplishment. We formed a guitar/bass duo and played "Eve of Destruction" and "Nashville Cats" for beer in the campus pub. Dave eventually joined the Navy and I transferred to another school. I ran into him in New York City in the late '60s; he had a job playing the French horn in the New London Navy Band, spare time in the city, money in his pocket and not too many complaints beyond haircuts.

By 1974, I had become a college graduate with a worthless degree in Theater, a half-baked pianist and three-chord guitarist, substitute teaching English as a Foreign Language in Washington, D.C., a job for which my qualifications were the fact that I spoke English and my students didn't, a job I performed with the flair of a longshoreman, a job that combined the joy of root canal work with the job security of a pimp's assistant valet.

One day, while trying to decide whether to spend the afternoon slitting my wrists or jumping off the 14th Street Bridge, I remembered my old classmate who had played in a Navy band. Not knowing the difference between a Navy band and The Navy Band, I set up an audition at the Navy Yard, an event that I will describe in glorious detail one day soon. (Chapter One: On the way to his audition, not having touched a piano in three years, Frank stops in a church, sits down at a broken, wheezing pump organ and runs through "A Foggy Day in London Town" to get warmed up.)

The upshot of it all was a number of years in Navy music for which David Lewis is somewhat responsible. Now that I've found him, I'm not sure whether to send him a thank-you letter or spam him with hate mail.