I just made a surprising discovery. You can use a certain genealogy web site to reverse search against street addresses and apartment numbers. I now know who lived in this apartment as far back as the 1980s, and who lived in the Parc Lincoln, rooms 317 and 1422, where I lived in the early 1990s.

It’s not as compelling a connection as I had imagined, but interesting nonetheless. I can enter “1 W 72nd St 10023” and get a dossier of everyone living at The Dakota, where John Lennon lived. The entry for Yoko Ono appears to include what was (at one time if not still) her phone number. I could do this for any address, it seems.

Part of me gets a fanciful notion of contacting previous residents of this or any of my other apartments and organizing a reunion of sorts, not that any of us ever knew each other. We occupied the same space, though, and that seems like a unique bond that could lead to something.

In reality there is not much I could do with knowing who lived here or at my previous apartments. But this search-and-release led me to discover that a violinist I roomed with in the early 90s is now concertmaster at a top-tier U.S. orchestra. My clearest memory of this individual is how he took me aside one day and said “If you ever need to pad your performance resumé with chamber music performances or whatever you can just say we did a bunch of concerts. I’ll back you up if anyone calls me to verify. Just say we did all the Beethoven Violin Sonatas and I’ll say it’s true.”

He went on at some length about how “everyone” did stuff like this. A popular trick was to claim you did a concert series at a venue that no longer existed, so there would be no way to verify it even if someone wanted to. At the time (according to this person) a fire had destroyed a particular library somewhere out west, killing the long-time organizer of the library’s concert series. On account of this mishap musicians all over the country filled in their resumés with concerts allegedly performed at that venue, bringing an air of sadness and prestige for having been associated with a venue that met such a dismal end.

I never did anything like this but always wondered to what extent this person did, and how many others were complicit. I see his performance resumé today and find that it does look strangely bloated, including alleged appearances with obscure orchestras in China and Poland, and a number of chamber music performances for which I can find no online trace of ever having occurred — though I did not and do not intend to spend a lot of time sleuthing.

Obviously the guy can play or he wouldn’t be principal violin at a pretty decent orchestra, but I gotta wonder if he got ahead more easily with a phony resumé then he would have got ahead honestly. I also wonder what would happen if he was called out on this little scheme, and what it might mean for his conspirators who backed him up in verifying these phantom performances.