How to book 251 concerts, part 7: browsing, cruising, and crowdsourcing

At each concert (and online, and in conversation) I ask people if they know of places with a nice—or anyhow playable—piano in as-yet-unscheduled towns. I don’t get tons of suggestions from any one concert, and many end up recommending the same few good but also fairly obvious venues in larger towns. Overall, though, crowdsourcing is a significant source of bookings.

Then there’s browsing and cruising. Browsing is mostly online (Google maps is some kind of wonder). Cruising involves trying, in the face of life’s many counter-pressures, to leave early enough to have time en route to concerts to peer into church windows,* go out of our way to the off-route villages, or talk to general storekeepers, librarians, or the person weeding the flower bed in front of the town hall, all while flipping through the Vermont Atlas and Gazetteer (also a wonder). 

Sometimes these modes converge in delightful serendipity. Yesterday, on our way to the First Unitarian Church of Chester, we passed an astonishing number of markers for Coolidge sites—Coolidge State Forest, Coolidge State Park, Coolidge Range—and eventually one for the Calvin Coolidge Historic Site. “I should play the Plymouth concert on Grace Coolidge’s 1895 piano!” I exclaimed. “Grace Coolidge had an 1895 piano?” my wife asked. I admitted I did not actually know this. But I figured that as an educated turn-of-the-century upper-middle-class woman, she played. I wasn’t unserious—I really did plan to follow up—but I wasn’t confident of the odds that the homestead had kept the hypothetical family piano, let alone maintained it.

A couple of hours later I was making my usual appeal for venues at the Chester concert. Less than 24 hours after that, concert attendee Judie Raffety sent me this:

The Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Plymouth Notch has a beautiful piano owned by Grace Coolidge who was a pianist. In the museum there, it is located in a lovely performance room (with terrific acoustics) overlooking the mountains. The site is closed now until May, but I'm sure they would be delighted to host one of your concerts during their Centennial Year in 2023.

The Coolidge Historic Site refers to the instrument as “the famous Grace Coolidge piano” and it turns out it’s a cut above the old family upright I had imagined. But I won’t divulge any more just now, so as not to spoil the eventual “about the piano” feature for the Plymouth concert write-up.

*“I really need to print some business cards”, I said to myself around the third time someone asked “can I help you?” with some combination of sincerity and suspicion.