You’ll always regret dumping your piano

When a note from professional pianist Joshua Raoul Brody popped up in my inbox, with a subject line referencing a column preferring Flower Piano amateurs to Flower Piano pros, I winced. “I am one of the scheduled piano players to whom you gave only medium-sized shrift, as compared with the praise you heaped upon the walk-ups,” he began. I hunkered down, ready to be scolded.

But “I am totally with you in that,” he wrote. “I am appalled by the descent of personal music-making in American culture. When I was a kid, I’d walk into a home and be as amazed by the absence of a piano as I would be if they didn’t have a couch or a bathroom. Now people are giving pianos away.”

In Brody’s Thursday night set, he played Beatles music, inviting members of the audience to sing along with live accompaniment. When he announced this and someone yelled, “Oh, you don’t want to hear me sing,” Brody was moved to respond directly.

“I stepped away from the piano to the lip of the ‘stage’ (there is, indeed, something resembling a stage in the Zellerbach Gardens).” He said he’d been doing this for a long while, and many people have responded that way, “and not a single one of them was right. I wanted to hear them all . ... ‘It’s not about whether you’re good or not. I just want you to sing . ... Nobody needs a Pulitzer Prize in literature to write an email, nor Cordon Bleu training to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. But somewhere along the line someone decided that if you don’t have training, experience or innate talent (or all three) you are forbidden from singing in public. That’s a lie.’ ”

There was applause, and a line of people waiting to sing for the rest of his set, which lasted four hours. One woman, he says, sang only after a friend offered to sing with her. “The woman chose ‘All My Loving,’ and the friend demurred, saying ‘I don’t know that one,’ adding the magic (to my ears) words ‘I’ll just improvise.’ They both totally knew the song and totally killed it, and as they were leaving the stage, I pulled them aside and said, “I want you to take this home with you: You went from ‘I can’t’ to ‘I just did.’ ”

Brody’s “Beatles Thingy a/k/a/ Plays His Favorite Beatles Songs and Accompanies You on Yours” is at the Rite Spot in San Francisco on the first Tuesday of every month, and at Kensington Circus Pub in Kensington on first Thursdays.

Meanwhile, flutist Tim Goodrich — who describes himself as a “journeyman,” not quite a pro, not quite an amateur — wrote to say that he attended with flute in hand and jammed with a piano player. He has a problem, however, “when a ground/band (trio or quartet) with guitars and other instruments come in and take over. They co-opt the place and it goes against the original intent of this gathering, in my humble opinion.”

Moreover, while he agrees that “it’s all about the amateurs,” he wrote, “I get frustrated sometimes when you have to wait and wait for a piano while babies/toddlers/ kids who can’t play hog it for a long time. It may be cute for their parents, but when you’re short on time, it can be a drag.”

Aw, let the kids have their go. As the metronome teaches us, everything in good time.

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “It’s not real. It never was.” Street philosopher overheard near Everett Middle School by Jason Whitaker

The Handful Players, a children’s musical program in the Western Addition, was founded and is run by Judith Cohen. She was doing an errand at a UPS office recently when a clerk asked if her name was Judith. Yes, she said, and “How do you know me?” He said he’d been in the first class of the Handful Players (in 2007), and the more than memorable experience had affected his life.

He’d recently graduated with a degree in biochemistry from an engineering college but needs to get a graduate degree to get hired in that field. So, hoping to study medical anthropology later, he was working at UPS for a while.

He told her his story, and she asked if he wanted a part-time job. He said he thought working there would allow him to give back some of the encouragement he’d received. And when she offered him her business card, he said he still had an old one, because his experience had made such an impact on him.