I will remember my time spent at that restaurant for all the challenges encountered and if I were only to impress one last thing upon the reader, it is a desire to inform and enlighten you about the important role of a live musician in a restaurant. I hope to have intimated in this short little excursion, that the restaurant musician is in a situation to spin a web that promotes a very unique type of social bonding. The live musician in these situations sets up an atmospheric soundtrack. Significantly, it is grounded in real time, the essence of the moment. As I played through my numbers, I reveled in the fact that my audience was made up of randomly collected New Yorkers looking not only for a good meal, but for an engaging, but at the same time laid back atmosphere within which to unwind after a long week of toil. My constant desire throughout was to set in place an attractive musical environment, whereby any person of any background might let their collar down a little and relax to the variety of stylized ethnic sounds conjured out of an accordion, sounds that were homespun and often far removed from the more common sonic fare typically pervading, if not overwhelming the social sphere of popular musical culture these days. In Queens, New York, at a German restaurant, my hubris had been to creatively amplify with an accordion one big snapshot of who we are as a collective body of Americans living together in one diverse but unified society, e pluribus unum.

                            photo by Roland Millman