Just to make sure that I kept up my quota of acts of stupidity for the month, I washed both my contact lenses down the bathroom sink last weekend. My excuse was that I forgot I wasn’t wearing them when I opened the case and rinsed them down the drain. The reason that this was inexcusable — and hence stupid — is that I can barely see my hand in front of my face without them, so I still can’t imagine why I thought I wasn’t wearing them in the first place.

Anyway, to get to the point of this, which is neither about contact lenses nor stupidity, I called my friend Alan, musician and Atlanta optician extraordinaire, to see if he could overnight a pair of gas permeables to me on the next plane.

“I have a gig Saturday night!” I sobbed into the phone. “I won’t be able to see who I’m playing for!” (Not always a bad thing, by the way).

Alan, being a musician as well as a doctor, asked the most important questions first.

“What will you be playing?” he asked.

“The accordion,” I replied.

Stunned silence on the other end of the line.

“Do you mean to tell me that you’re playing the accordion now?” he asked. I’m still not sure if his tone was meant to imply surprised approbation or incredulous horror.

The accordion is an instrument that people either passionately love — or just as passionately hate. I purchased my first one some years ago during an amusement park gig; it was a nifty little red squeezebox that came in handy for strolling. When I got hired by a cruise line a few months later, I offered to bring it along — but the executive music director said that none of his pianists had ever worked an accordion in the act before, and he couldn’t imagine it ever being done.

I left it at home, but a few months later in Mexico I found the strolling accordion of my dreams, a 48-button Weltmeister from Germany. It cost me two weeks salary, but I had the music shop hold it for me until we came back into port in Ensenada. Excited about my new toy, I told the ship’s music director that we would soon have an accordion on board.

“Over my dead body,” was his reply. It turned out that he came from Indiana, and somewhere along the way he had gotten accordioned out, probably from one-too-many polka parties.

When I did get my Weltmeister a week later, I sat in my cabin (a few doors down from the music director) and launched into “La Vie En Rose.” A few minutes later my phone rang. It was the music director.

“So you got it,” he said.

“Yes!” I replied, happily,

“You and that thing are both going overboard,” he answered morosely, and hung up.

To their credit, the rest of the show band on board thought it was cool and had me play French waltzes all night while they got drunk in the cabin next door.

Those of us who think the accordion is cool tend to make just a bit of fun at ourselves for playing it. If you see a bumper sticker that says, “Play the accordion, go to jail. It’s the law,” then chances are it’s an accordion player driving that car.

How did such a grand instrument, whose rich sonorous tone became the hallmark of French music, of Argentinean tango music, and gorgeous music from countless other cultures, get condemned to the laughingstock shelf in American music stores?

It’s my personal opinion that the accordion’s bad rap came from all those years the “Lawrence Welk Show” was on TV. Don’t get me wrong — I think that his accordionist, the recently-departed Myron Floren, was a genius. But the Welk show was wrapped in such a triple-layer of schmaltz and so loaded with bad musical arrangements, that the whole package came across as cheesier than a fondue factory. It’s a shame, because you had incomparable instrumentalists like Floren and the superb ragtime pianist Jo Anne Castle, surrounded by around 20 very mediocre singers dressed in costumes that most kindergartens wouldn’t use for the annual spring tap-dance revue.

The same thing happened to bagpipe playing, for different reasons. Until the 1970s, when that bagpipe recording of “Amazing Grace” came out and was played without ceasing on all the radio stations for about a year, bagpipes were considered by many people to be the whoopee cushion of musical instruments. I can’t imagine why; I think the sound of the bagpipe is one of the loveliest sounds in the world. But then, I’m an accordion player, so I guess it figures.

We only had one accordionist back where I’m from; she was a Texas accordion champ who moved to Atlanta and promptly snagged the few accordion gigs, because nobody else down there could play one. In fact, a lot of folks down there have never even seen an accordion. Back in the south, we don’t polka — we clog.

One thing I love about Colorado is that there’s room here for all kinds of music.

Coloradans seem to like things like accordions, bagpipes and all the other instruments considered obnoxious by a lot of people in other locales. We Coloradans like our dogs huge, our sports extreme, our mountain bikes loaded, and our musical instruments loud. It’s our way of living large in the High Country.