Last week, I wrote about my career in musical theater. It was as uneventful as it was short — five nights as a literal walk-on in “The Music Man.” I was in our long-gone summer theater, tooting away on my trombone, as part of the “before” group of incompetent marching band wannabes.

I was right in my element, since on the trombone, incompetence was my stock in trade. I’d been in the band two years and had progressed from total cluelessness to glaring incompetence. The reason for this was neither subtle nor complex: I never practiced.

So WHY did I never practice?

Had I been evaluated by an eminent Fruedian analyst, I’m sure they would’ve discovered the source. Perhaps I’d been crippled by an overwhelming inferiority complex brought about by being overshadowed by my highly successful older brother? Doubtful.

Or while on the outside I was an upbeat and light-hearted lad, in reality, the Inner Me was besieged by demons who kept me in a constant state of distraction? Maybe.

Or it could’ve been those freaky flying monkeys in “The Wizard of Oz,” having seen them on the Pontiac Theater’s giant screen at the tender age of 5, had left me with lifelong trauma? More likely than the others, but still dubious.

So while the cause of my indolence might forever lie undiscovered in the inner recesses of my psyche, the results were as obvious as the Fine Semitic Nose on my face: I was The Teacher’s Worst Nightmare — an incompetent kid who just didn’t care.

It was one of the first and most important lessons I learned as a teacher: The students most in need of help were almost always those least willing to seek or accept it. You can cajole, flatter, threaten and reason with them and none of it won’t make no nevermind. They didn’t care, they never cared and they ain’t ever GONNA care. For all the good it’d do with those anti-students, you might as well be whistling “Dixie” (or if you prefer, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”)

And that gets us back to me in the band — the perfect anti-musician.

But why didn’t I practice and why did I willingly let myself be the anchor man of the band world? Well, if I was nothing else back then, I was consistent: As crappy a trombonist as I was, I was an equally crappy student. I didn’t practice my trombone, I didn’t study my subjects. Looking back, I think practicing and studying interfered with my constant daydreaming, and if anything was gonna be struck from my life, it was NOT gonna be my fantasizing, thank you very much.

When asked why I never took my trombone home and practiced I said it was because it was so heavy and unbalanced that to shlep it more than a hundred yards or so was as insulting to my deltoids as it was to my psyche. I further added that if I’d taken up the piccolo, I might’ve already have gotten a gig with the London Philharmonic.

If I was as lousy a trombonist as I was, why did I stay in the band? And beyond that, why was I even ALLOWED to stay in the band?

To answer the first question: To me, band was a social experience, not a musical one. For one thing, I liked being around the other kids. For another, it got me out of study halls (which in my case were wholly misnamed).

So much for me. What about the powers that be of the band? Well, while I was a horrid musician, I was also a weak one, so my playing went unnoticed. As long as I tooted along in time with the others’ tooting, and didn’t toot when the rest of the band was toot-free, it was as if I wasn’t even there — a good deal for all involved.

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The days of bohemian dreams

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And it was my incompetence and apathy that made the summer theater so appealing to me. Or more exactly, made the summer theater ACTORS so appealing to me. First, they were New York City bohemians — the only ones I’d ever seen. They guys had long hair and wrinkled, paint-splattered clothes. The gals also had long hair, and they seemed to mostly dress in basic beatnik black. And all of them had an air of aloofness that clearly said, without speaking: Behold, urban artists walk among you denizens of Dogpatch.

But beyond that, they — totally unlike me — were fiercely dedicated to what they were doing. They had an intensity that was riveting — in rehearsal, in performance, even in just walking around town. They lived to act, for it was where they belonged, and where they always WANTED to belong.

They had heads full of Stanislovski; hearts full of Ibsen, Shaw and O’Neill.; and dreams of seeing their names in lights on Broadway. I admired them as both artists and people, especially since even then, I knew their chances of success were nil.

Regardless of their talent, drive, looks or anything, even if the gods smiled on them, the odds were stacked against them. Probably the closest they ever would get to acting on Broadway was 100 yards east of it, on Main Street, Saranac Lake.

Our summer theater stayed a fond and integral part of my life, every year from earliest childhood ’till I left town. Every summer, a new cast arrived, made up I’m sure of few, if any, members from previous years. And every year they did their best doing what they loved best, bringing something unique to My Home Town.

And where did they eventually end up? Your guess is as good as mine. But if I were a gambling man, I’d bet they ended up settling down, getting straight jobs, raising a family, ferrying kids back and forth to Little League games and Girl Scout meetings and so on and so forth. In other words, they, like the rest of us, ended up like the rest of us.

But regardless of where they went or what they did, I’m sure tucked away in their nostalgia archives were memories of their times onstage in our little summer theater. And when they thought back, I’d like to think they remembered it as a time, not of great and important dreams thwarted, but a time of smaller and no-less-important dreams fulfilled.