From
“The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst
6 November
Sometimes
I got the thing right!
Arnold
Kunst and the Piano, Part Three
In the late 1960’s I was stationed with the US Army in Germany.
The good news was that I had NOT been sent to Vietnam [there were 500,000 GI’s
there at the time – a scarey place!] but even so I was really depressed being
so far from home for such a long time.
I was also bored. So I thought about filling the considerable
cracks in my life by what I could do at/with a piano.
· I went to the
local officers’ club and asked if they’d like some background music during
Happy Hour on Friday night. The guy was over the moon: “You play the piano and
you’re American? SURE! What do you charge?” [I was Automatically In Demand –
local musicians, I learned, didn’t confer any hometown flavor on homesick
officers.] “$20.00 for the night, 6 to 10,” I said. He agreed on the spot. That
worked so spectacularly well that I did the same thing at another nearby
officers’ club for Saturday night, and a third for Sunday afternoon. You do the
math: $60 a week when my Army salary was $135 a month.
· I also put a
piano teacher add in “Stars and Stripes” the local Armed Forces rag,
[$5.00/hour], and within 4 weeks had 7 pupils.
In the meantime I heard about this 10%-compounded-quarterly
dollar-drain savings program the Army was promoting. I saved a good 80% of my
Army salary for the 20 months I was posted in Germany, and paid all my bills
–buying everything from toothpaste to train tickets - with what I earned
teaching and playing piano in Germany.
Advantages:
· Saving the Army salary and
living on what I could do at the piano made the whole Army-in-a-faraway country
actually exciting!
· Also, when I
was discharged I ended up with a check for over $2,000, money I parked in the
stock market until, 5 years later, it had grown to a very respectable
downpayment for the first house my new wife and I bought.
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