"It wasn't the lack of dressing rooms that got me," said Conductor-Pianist Leonard Bernstein grimly. "Or the fact that there was no air conditioning. What did it was the ghoul that put the furniture polish on the keys." Bernstein had just led the New York Philharmonic through the first concert of its seven-week Latin American tour. The experience was one that neither the orchestra nor the Panama City audience was likely ever to forget.
When the Philharmonic turned up at the Rio Theatre, the players discovered that a tropical thunderstorm had saturated their trunks, lined up along an outside wall, and soaked...
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