- So I've had a little bit of singing about drinking.

So I'm going to be talking about my friendship with a guy named Fero, F-E-R-O, short for Frantishek or Francis.

My friendship with Fero, a drinking and singing buddy, goes back to Autumn 1991.

That was in Czechoslovakia two years after the Velvet Revolution had forced the communist party to give up its guaranteed majority that it had held for 40 years.

The Velvet Revolution had been a movement largely of intellectuals and students in the tempetuous November of 1989, shortly after the Berlin Wall had come down.

Its leader was soon elected president.

That was Vatslav Havel, a playwright and dissident who had been in and out of prison since the 1970s, often derided as a bourgeois intellectual by party publications.

Pharaoh, by contrast, was a metal worker from a factory that had produced tanks for the East Block in Friends.

More on that later.

I'd arrived in Czechoslovakia in October 1990 after applying to an organization called Education for Democracy, which placed native speakers of English with colleges and schools in need of instructors.

Russian as Warsaw Packed Lingua Franca was now out and world English was in.

I just finished college as an English major at UVA and dreamt of teaching at a university in Prague, hobnobbing with students at pubs after hours.

And hopefully I could run into Havel who was known to visit taverns with his entourage of Literatian actors.

But that was not to be.

Instead, I was sent to Slovakia, not even to the lower key, but still bustling Brachislava just down the Danube from Vienna, but to Martin, a town of 50,000 in the mountains.

I was somewhat compensated by the fact that this little city had been the Slovak cultural capital in the 1800s and still had a vibrant theatrical and artistic life.

And just two weeks after I arrived, Vatslav Havel came to give a speech on the town square.

But those Halcyon days of post-Soviet triumphalism were over as Havel reminded the crowd there was work to do and the threat of nationalism loomed over the horizon.

He repeated that message in even starker terms less than three weeks later when I went to see him on Prague's Square.

George H. W. Bush had come to celebrate the first anniversary of the Velvet Revolution and to make a pitch for the coalition against Saddam Hussein, who had just occupied Kuwait three months before.

I went back from that event to the town of Martin Reddy to roll up my sleeves and make a difference.

I became so carried away with my mission to the east that the following spring I signed up for a second academic year.

To offset my westernizing influence, I decided to support and learn about the local culture by singing in a chorus.

And that's where I met Pharaoh.

I was in the base section.

Pharaoh in his late 30s was a tenor with sandy hair and beard, a wiry skilled metal worker as he proudly told me.

This civic choir named Martinski Spevoko for the town held rehearsals in the sixth floor conference room of a socialist era engineering firm.

Afterwards, several of us guys would go to the ground floor buffet a snack bar with alcohol.

We'd share jokes and small talk and sing folk songs in schmalty two-part harmonies.

We also discussed politics, often politely disagreeing in multi-party European fashion.

But after the country held its second free elections in May of 1992, the results threatened to sow discord.

There would be trouble forming a governing coalition and it became clear that Slovakia would split off.

Havel's warning was coming true.

I was angry at the Slovak populist strong man, Vladimir Mechiar, for breaking up the country, but Pharaoh was angry at Havel because his tank manufacturing job was in limbo thanks to Havel's halt on exporting armored vehicles to former Soviet allies like Syria.

But he won't ban light weapons, my friend griped one evening after practice.

Why?

Because they're made in the Czech Republic.

It's just a Slovak peasants have to bear the brunt.

But you America, he looked at me as though I were the personification of my country, "You can sell your military hardware all over the world."

And I had heard anti-Americanism before and largely dismissed it, but here was a more concrete gripe that I'd never encountered.

Still, Pharaoh gave me a good-natured slap on the back and bought me a drink to show that there were no hard feelings.

He lit into the refrain of the battle hymn of the republic and accented glory, glory, hallelujah, and invited me to fill in the verses while the others hummed harmony parts.

Before long, we were all singing a folk diddy about a girl transformed into a deer by a witch, first to the tune of the Star-Spangled Banner and then to that of the Russian national anthem.

This combination of reverence, irreverence and improvisation taught me that music and friendship can transcend political squabbles and that we should all listen to the concerns of the working class.

In 2003, I was in the Czech Republic doing research and language study and Pharaoh invited me to join the choir on a retreat in the Central Slovak foothills.

That Saturday, Saturday's focused rehearsal included work on sacred hymns, patriotic Slovak compositions and somewhat highbrow arrangements of folk songs.

It was like old times.

At the party in the clubroom of the resort that evening, everyone, men and women of the chorus joined in singing along to a guitar.

This time I noticed that Pharaoh was going around crouching and talking to every single member of the group, particularly the less sociable ones.

So lesson two from Pharaoh, make everyone feel comfortable and included.

In the autumn of 2011, I visit again.

Pharaoh has built a stucco cottage surrounded by fruit trees in a village up the hill from this town of Martin.

It's an unseasonable 80 degrees and central Slovakia has had no rain for weeks.

The once roaring stream out back has dried to a trickle.

Sun scorches the one lane blacktop in front of his wire fence and on the grassy hill beyond white clusters of sheep bleat near the horizon.

Pharaoh's hair and beard are now gray.

His back is hunched from years of hammering metal.

He reaches up into a plum tree with a pole and shakes the sagging fruit laden branches.

A shower of ripe plums plops to the shady ground, a few dry leaves floating down behind them.

The unburdened limbs rise like a slave freed of its shackles.

I gather the firm fruit into a yellow plastic pail, trying to avoid the wasps, buzzing around the rotting stuff that's laying there for a week.

In the heat of the Indian summer, it smells like sangria the day after the party.

Pharaoh shouts in Slovak, "Ha ha, come on bourgeois boy.

Work.

You're going to get your upcomings now, now that the revolution is here, just like we used to rib each other 20 years before, only now referencing the, at the time, recent Occupy Wall Street protests.

I'm not the 1% I counter.

My granddads were a farmer and a railroad worker."

Oh, good proletarian peasant stock.

The communists would have loved you, hey?

But not your free market views, damn sorrow stuff they tried to brainwash my son with when he studied in.

He constantly refers to billionaire George Soros as a rightist.

He can't seem to understand that in the US the investor, philanthropist, philosopher is regarded as a lefty, no matter how many times I explain.

Or that in the West, workers often make common calls with feminist gays and minorities.

Lesson three from Pharaoh, never assume that you can map America's left right dichotomy onto the political grid of other countries.

"How have you managed in the post-tank production years?

"I ask.

"Got steady work now, mostly making tractors.

And Pharaoh hasn't done badly.

His parcel of land, 50 by 120 feet is complete with loft and cellar.

It could sleep a dozen for a weekend getting getaway.

In the evening we sit at a cheap formica topped table drinking the local grassy tasting Martinski's droid beer cooled in cistern water straight from half liter green bottles.

A black and white portable in his kitchenette blares a live broadcast from Brachislava.

Camera crews and reporters flood the parliamentary press gallery.

Slovakia is the last Eurozone member to vote on a Greek bailout package and all eyes are on this tiny mountainous republic.

Finally, people understand what pisses us off, Pharaoh snears.

Retirees in our country live on a third of the peasant of the, a third of the pension of the Greeks, but we got to fork over four and a half billion euros for this stabilization fund.

And then he pulls out a guitar and shrugs, let's forget the politics.

He lights into a tune not far from this town of trenching lives a beautiful girl named Katarina.

I've not seen Pharaoh in person in 12 years, but we still talk on Skype, always winding up the conversation as friends with disparate views.

And I'll never dismiss his ideas even if I disagree.

He includes me among his friends and I will always honor his proletarian dignity.

Thank you.