KEEPIN' UP WITH SAM

Press inquiries keep coming about Samuel Thompson, the lone violinist who played Bach for fellow refugees at the Louisiana Superdome and New Orleans Convention Center. The latest arrived a few days ago from Li Chen, a reporter in China who saw our items about Thompson, and asked to be put in touch with him for a story in the magazine Focus on People Weekly.

We've also heard from the Boston Globe, the classical music radio station WFMT in Chicago, and Strings magazine in northern California. All of them said they wanted to do stories and were stirred by our items of either Sept. 3 (Eyeballing Katrina), Sept. 7 (Hurricane Music) or Sept. 9 ( Untold Story of 'Hurricane Music').

We have no idea how many others are writing about Sam or have already done so, though we're aware of mentions in Newsweek and Time, and stories in the San Antonio Express-News and the Los Angeles Times (which reported on him before we did, although we didn't know it at the time), and a caption in The (Baton Rouge) Advocate, which published the photo of him that caught our eye in the first place and which we posted but had to take down for copyright reasons. And we know from Sam's subsequent emails to us that following his evacuation from New Orleans friends of his put him up in Fort Worth, Texas, and that he's been working as a substitute player in the San Antonio Symphony.

As we've already noted, Sam says he was prompted to play for his fellow refugees by two women from Canada who were staying in the same youth hostel he was in and who were with him in the Superdome. It turns out that one of them, Sara-Lise Rochon, took a photo of him playing what she called "that magical instrument of yours." There it is, above, and it's a great substitute for the photo we had to take down.

Something Sara-Lise Rochon said about the value of music when she sent Sam the photo is especially worth noting -- as is the charm of her English, which is not the first language of une Quebecoise. "I'm so happy you played over there," she wrote, "not only because it's helping you now, mostly because it made so much people (including me and all the people from the hostel) feel like there was still a world going on somewhere, because music still existed, and it came for us in that helldome."

-- Tireless Staff of Thousands