What follows are distilled quotes from a conversation with New Orleans Glassharper Peter Bennett from 2003.

Do you have a specific location where you perform?

As a professional street performer, one must make sure one has at least four or five venues that work for your particular act. The glass instrument too has about five spots where I am able to make what living there is at this. Jackson Square is one of those, Bourbon Street— until the police shut it down as a performance venue. The police gave me a ticket a couple of weeks ago for performing without a license on Bourbon Street. The irony of that is there’s no such thing as a street performer’s license. It cost me a fair amount to get an attorney to take it to court to get the ticket thrown out. One of the things one learns early on in this profession is to expect harassment by the police.

How long have you been performing in New Orleans?

I travel all over the country, but I have been coming here to New Orleans for nine or 10 years now.

Where’s home originally?

I was born and brought up in a tiny village of 500 souls in the center part of New York state. I soon discovered a street performer just can’t make a living in a village of 500 souls. With any luck I will live the rest of my life in New Orleans, which has quickly become my very favorite city in the world.

How did you decide to do this?

Hunger.

Were you ever involved in another profession?

In the course of my career I have had, at last count, seven professions. I only managed to stay at one job for about 10 years at a time or less. In my early years, I went to work at a family welding business in Cortland, New York, where my job was to sweep floors. They wanted me to start out at the bottom of course. One of the weekly tasks was to clean out the sludge that was dropped into a tip underneath the acetylene generator. That’s how long ago this was. Every week I had to climb down into the pit underneath the generator and pluck out the further, as it was called, the white sticky sludge. It was a miserable job, and as soon as I could, I left, I went out to the western part of New York State— Hammondsport, New York— where a family friend was starting a winery on a shoestring having bought all used equipment. I’ll tell you how used the equipment was; the machine that shoved the court down into the bottle was so loose in the give that it didn’t even shove the cork all the way down into the bottle. So, my job was to stand on the gap between the corking machine and the machine that put the foil over the neck of the bottle and suck the corks home. That too was a boring job, but at least we could sample the wines at lunchtime. I went from there to the Olympic Peninsula, in the state of Washington, where I signed on to a salmon fishing boat. My job is an apprentice was to bait the hooks for six fisherman who lined the rails of this boat and who fished with hand lines. Today, you can’t even commercially fish for salmon because we managed to wipe out the species out almost completely in that part of our world. Now, I am, as you might have guessed, a fast learner. So, on the very first season, I went from being an apprentice to having my full union license.

So, you can see in the course of my early career I’ve been a further-mucker. I’ve served as a cork-socker. And I am proud to tell you I still maintain my license as a master baiter.

And you’re a poet too.

True story. Among the jobs I’ve held was a reporter for a daily newspaper in Troy, New York.

And you opted for the unconventional.

Well, I went from there to managing a metal lubricating company. When I managed to drive that into bankruptcy, I went into selling computers, a job I came to quickly abhor. It was about 10 years later that I decided it would be much more fun to be my own boss again and heck of a lot more fun to entertain people in the process. That’s how I ended up here.