At least for the concert that I did, Peter allowed anyone who did a guest set to get in without paying the admission fee. There didn't seem to be any limit on how many people got up to sing before the concert started, or how many songs they did. Everything was very free form. One person ended up doing five or six songs. A friend of mine who was living in the area came to hear me, who I hadn't seen in a long time. I wasn't living ib Boston, and it was a chance to see him, and for him to hear my concert. There were so many people who did guest sets that my friend finally had to leave, because it was getting late. He never did hear me sing.

That night, I stayed over in Peter's apartment, with some other guy who was passing through. The thing that sticks out in my mind is that he tried to get me to buy a couple of bushel baskets of organic carrots. He'd gotten a real good deal on them and figured he'd make a handsome profit selling them. The only problem was that they were old. If you wanted to buy a flexible carrot, he was the man to see.
You could have put eyes on them, and with a few strokes of a knife, made an orange Gumby out of them. Some of the thinner ones, you could bend into a complete circle and make a handsome organic bracelet out of them. There were infinite possibilities.

A couple of weeks, I was home visiting my family and called an old friend of mine. He had told me that he never answered the phone because he was sick of getting phone solicitations to buy stuff. When his answering machine came on, and identified myself as a salesman for organic carrots, and that I was offering a special price per bushel. It's strange how the mind works. I hadn't thought of Peter Johnson and the organic carrot salesman in years.

As I said, Peter has a special place in my heart for offering me one of my very first concerts.

Jerry