Fame and Fortune. What an odd thing, this urge to be famous.  (About the urge to be rich, more later). To be famous is to be widely known and celebrated… for something outstanding. So, to stand out from the crowd. Maybe it’s no more than an extension of the need all humans have to be ‘recognized,’ ‘acknowledged’ for who we think we are (or could be if we were recognized!).  In many cultures, and I saw it in Morocco, you must look the person you meet in the eyes, ask after his health and his family’s health, and in some way touch him or her–by a handshake, or a touching of cheeks, which is followed by putting one’s hand on one’s heart.

So, back to famous. While browsing the Internet the other day (looking for my name!), I came across the interview below: 
Tuba player extraordinaire Howard Johnson gave an interview with Roll Magazine about his involvement with John  Lennon.
When did you last speak to John?
“I spoke to him the night he died. I was going to bring John and Yoko a recording I had of Pam Windo — she’s married to a saxophone player named Gary Windo and she sang, frankly, something like Yoko did. She and her husband and another tenor player from her hometown of Bristol in England had a way of playing unison parts —the same notes but having it sound very strange because the pitches were dirty on one or both of them but their phrasing was exactly right. So it just ended up being a great sound that I thought John would like because these guys could also play in tune and John had talked to me about taking a horn section on tour. So I called the studio. Yoko answered the phone and passed it to John. I said, ‘I brought that record with the tenor players I’d like you to hear, should I bring it up to the studio?’ And he said, ‘We’re going to leave a little early tonight, bring it in tomorrow in the afternoon.’ And I thought, ‘Well, that’s good’ because I wanted to watch Monday night football. And Monday night football is what told us that he had been killed.”

Kevin Whitehead, NPR’s jazz critic, wrote to me:
“That is a weird tale. In some alternate universe, you may be more famous than you are already!”

So I might be famous in an alternate universe, something like Einstein’s space-time continuum theory.  And I didn’t mention, I have the same birthday as Bob Dylan. For now, I’m happy to be known by the people I know.