Searching for identity in this crazy post law school world, I have been more than recent memory serves playing lip services to my old friend – my tenor saxophone. A little known fact is that I am in a lunch-time band at work called, somewhat inappropriately, the EB-1s where we should be referred to more appropriately as the EB-3s.
Anyway, our band had been fortunate enough to be signed to a monthly gig by the Manayunk Development Commission to play at their Second Saturday Festival until this past weekend when we told not to come back.
The reason was not that we were not good enough – though I would have happily accepted that rational – but the offered excuse was that we were not Philadelphian enough because our band leader – my legal assistant at the office – is Russian. We were guilty of playing some Russian folk music instead of the traditional blues based covers…
And as she tried to garner an explanation from the “booking agent” -- an aging hipster wearing a faux-hawk and a wrinkled rockabilly button-down shirt – he decided it better to focus on correcting her grammar rather than offer a logical explanation.
Not since the days of little league where I was teased for missing Tuesday practices to attend Hebrew School has such insensitivity – such discrimination - been witnessed.
So for now I am boycotting the booking agents “gallery” (which is really nothing more than a framed picture shop hidden next to Le Bus Bakery) on Main Street – and instead of seeing us on the street every second Saturday of the month – we will be filling the First Friday night air in Old City – where being different is being part of the majority even as the bars fill with fraternity alumni.
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2 comments:
What! Russians? In Philadelphia? Aint never been no Ruskies in the Philly delta. The swamps where Ben Franklin paddled along hawking “Poor Richard’s Almanac” are the natural birthplace of the blues, and if you ever et cheesesteak gumbo in the bayous of West Philly , you would know why! Thems as says they’s fifty thowsand Russian speakers in and about Philly are just plumb tetched in the head. So I don’t wanna hear no defensing of no sax playin’, law scribblin’, slav-singin’, so-called band leader. Billy Penn done never mixed jazz and blues with slavic folk songs. I guaróntee it. After all, there’s laws agin’ those sorts of things in Philly, or there oughtta be!
My father told me that he had diligently worked to adopt a Pennsylvanian accent during high-school. I think it is still true that Northerners tend to view the dying accents of the South as an indicator of intellectual inferiority.
In our work we often have to struggle greatly to understand the "clients" with whom we do business. Perhaps it is this necessary adaption of mindset, the very real need to set aside any evaluation of the pleasantness of the sounds themselves, that helps us avoid imputing value judgments on the speakers themselves.
I'm sorry your friend suffered through such a response.
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