The summer of ’62 marked the peak of my musical career. It happened in a performance of “The Music Man” that I played perfectly. Then again, it was impossible NOT to be perfect, since the script called for me and my fellow bandmates to play atrociously.

First, some vital background.

For as long as I can remember, we had a summer theater in town. It was in a lovely old wooden building that’d been an Odd Fellows hall, on the site of what is now the Hotel Saranac’s parking garage. I don’t know what the interior was like originally, but as a theater, it was in the round. A popular summer attraction, it had a good variety of plays and I think always played to a full house.

As a little kid, I went to some of the performances with my family and remember enjoying them immensely. Suffice it to say, the ones we went to were more along the lines of “Harvey and Arsenic” and “Old Lace” than “Long Day’s Journey into Night” and “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

As much as I liked the shows, I enjoyed the actors even more, and not in the plays, but around town. Not that I actually knew any of them, but, though few in number, they had an outsized presence in town. Matter of fact, they were as hard to ignore as a Chinese National Guard platoon drilling in Riverside Park.

I’m sure we recruited them from Gotham. Certainly, they looked like authentic thee-ay-ter types, of the Bohemian variety. The guys were decked out in khakis and work shirts, showing that while artistes of the highest variety, but they also were also Friends of the Working Stiff. They had a macho vibe for sure, but not of the Bogie and Coop type. Instead, they were shock troops of the new frontier, a la James Dean and Marlon Brando. The women, in startling contrast to our local women, had long hair, eyeliner and pierced ears, and regardless of the style of their clothing, always decked out in black. They, like the guys, were of the contemporary theater scene. Not a Bette Davis or Joan Crawford among ’em, but some Eva Marie Saints, Pier Angelis and Joanne Woodward. For both the men and the women, their Staff of Life seemed to be cigarettes.

To me, they were hipsters extraordinaire who stepped out of the works of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs (who I’d discovered a couple of years before) — alienated and aloof, putting a real face on Existentialism alienation and aloofness. That all of them were under 25 and so were kids themselves, made no difference to me: They were hip, hot and here, which was all that mattered to my 15-year-old wannabe Beat self.

So how did I ever seek their company?

I didn’t. The fact is they sought MINE.

OK, I just exaggerated a wee bit. Or maybe MORE than a wee bit.

“The Music Man” was about a con man named Professor Harold Hill. Of course, he was no professor of anything, just one more good old homegrown American sleaze artist. His hustle was to go into a town hyping himself as an esteemed professor of music who wanted to organize a children’s band so they could have a worthwhile pastime that’d keep them out of trouble. He’d then get the towspeople to pony up a bunch of money to pay for instruments, uniforms and, of course, his instructions. Once he had the loot in his smarmy hands, he’d take off with it, on to fleece a new bunch of rubes.

In the play, his scam unravels when he falls in love with the local librarian, who in turn falls in love with him. And then, because this is musical theater and not reality, he commits to doing the right thing by making the band succeed, as well as committing himself to Marion.

If you like good music and corniness in equal measure (which I confess I do), it’s a delightful play. It also requires a bunch of kids in band uniforms, and that’s where my schoolmates and I came in. We were vital to the plot because early in the play the kids had to toot and tweet away on their instruments, in cacophonous chaos, never hitting the right notes. Then, at the end of the play, in splendid contrast, they’d become a real marching band, struttin’ their stuff down the main drag, in perfect step and playing “Seventy-Six Trombones” so stirringly, it woulda made John Philip Sousa, if not rise from the dead, then at least tap his toes on his coffin in perfect 4/4.

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Sliding into obscurity

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We owned that first scene. Regardless of our range of skills, we could play as horribly as any director could ask. This was especially true of me, since I was the worst trombonist in our band, and for all I knew, the worst musician in the entire North Country. There was a good reason for this: I was so damned lazy, I never practiced. Luckily for everyone else in the band, because I was so unskilled, I could hardly blow an audible note and so was blessedly drowned out by the others.

As for the last scene? If you saw the movie, you saw an incomparable marching band, marchingly and musically perfect. That had something to do with it being made up of members from The University of California and University of Southern California marching bands.

So what about us, here on the boards of My Home Time?

Since theater is all make-believe anyway, the director chose suggestion over verisimilitude: My bandmates and I were where we belonged for that scene — out of sight and out of mind, hunkered down and collecting dust and cobwebs on the cellar stairs. In our place, over the P.A. came “Seventy-Six Trombones” loudly, if somewhat scratchily, being played on a portable record player with a stack of pennies on its arm.

After the play’s end, we were hauled out of storage and steerage, and given a whirl in front of the wildly-applauding crowd — a real, Our Boys and Girls, God Love ‘Em Moment.

The gig lasted a week, after which my career in musical theater abruptly ended.

And then what happened to me, as a trombonist?

Well, if life was theater, my experience in “The Music Man” changed my life. I suddenly saw and appreciated the satisfaction and joy of artistic accomplishment, in this case, learning how to play the trombone. Then, after constant and dedicated practice, I fulfilled my true potential and became a trombone virtuoso — a Jack Teagarden du manque!

Of course, that’s if life was theater. But since life is, well … life … none of that happened. Instead, I stayed the unpracticed and unskilled zug I’d always been, a marginal musical cipher, consigned life in the third trombone chair … with no chance of parole.

Finally, I did the band, myself, and the world at large a favor, and quit the band. I’m sure not only did no one know I had left, but they probably thought some skilled newcomer had just been added.