At Flower Piano, amateurs are champs

We held off going to Flower Piano this year until nearly the end, for Friday’s NightGarden Piano. This was a fundraiser for the San Francisco Botanical Garden; featured performances were by scheduled professionals. There were food trucks selling snacks, and drinks were available for purchase.

So it was a lot more organized than it is during the day, when a few performances are scheduled, but most people bring picnics and plunk themselves down on the grass to listen to random players.

At night, trails were lit, volunteers showed the way, and paper maps and app maps were available. There was a magic to walking through the dark woods — the redwood grove, for example — brushing past other visitors. But at night, you couldn’t see whether they were smiling. If you were trading grins with passersby, you couldn’t tell.

And — with all due respect to professionals and their skills — the most delightful part of Flower Piano is seeing amateurs step forward from the crowd, walk forward shyly, perch on a chair and perform. It’s an homage to individual skill, but, more than that, it’s an homage to the pianos, a thank-you for all those lessons that parents paid for, all those hours of practice, all the times mothers told their fledgling key-bangers that if they stuck with it, they’d one day be the life of the party.

This is the party, and those amateurs are the life of it.

We get plenty of inspiring experiences in recital halls and at concerts. What we don’t get there is a grandmotherly woman sharing the “Summertime” she’s probably played for her husband for 40 years. What we don’t get there is someone who plays a few clunked-up notes, says — with no self-consciousness — that’s enough, then backs away goodnaturedly to let someone else have a shot at it.

To me, the Flower Piano experience is about random music on a shared instrument. Let’s not gum it up with too many experts.

Wearing masks was mandatory for the audience of “Still Standing,” a Joe Goode Performance Group work that, as Steven Winn reported, opened on Thursday, July 12 (and runs through Aug. 5), at the stately and historic Haas-Lilienthal House. The Mister is not an “Eyes Wide Shut” kind of guy, so I went with a pal. We were told if we took off the masks, we’d be asked to leave.

Director-choreographer Goode began by explaining that the work was all about “reinvention” and healing, particularly relevant to the home of a family that had come west, made a fortune and reinvented itself. We set out into this glorious Victorian to watch, listen and enter tableaux that came to life in individual rooms.

I was pretty much transfixed, particularly by a couple of sinuous dancers (Patricia West and Wailana Simcock, whose tattoos were a whole other exhibition within the performance) in a room right off the front parlor and by Molly Katzman and Brendan Barthel, who bounced around the kitchen like chimps in a jungle. These captivating scenes probably bore out Goode’s introductory explanation.

But I’d arrived primed for the avant-garde, intending to turn off my left brain (explaining part) in order to encourage the right side (feeling part). And part of that switch, especially in a sitespecific work, is seeing the big picture, the action as well as its surroundings.

So after the large group had been divided into smaller sections, about a dozen of us were led to the backyard, a space more modest than the verdant side garden. A staircase leading up from the lower-level ballroom was a stage for Katzman and Cookie Harrist, who were sidling, stepping, lifting each other.

Looking up, I noticed some movement in a house around the corner that had a window directly overlooking the area we occupied. The light was coming from inside, and a woman, apparently curious about the action in the neighboring backyard, was standing in the window. I considered waving to her, but that would have seemed like shouting yoo-hoo in church, breaking the spectators’ shared seriousness.

Her silhouette was perfectly visible, its details bedimmed by the backlighting. There seemed to be something triangular in one hand. I think she was eating pizza.

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “Move back. Your drool is way too close to my personal space.” Woman talking to her boxer, overheard in Precita Park by Dave Berry