Visiting Berkeley, in 1974, one spring afternoon as the crowds passed up and down Sproul Plaza, I stopped to watch the confrontation between a couple of street preachers and two or three guys who had brought along a large papier-mâché cow nearly as tall as they were. On one side the preachers with Bibles in their hands were threatening damnation and calling people to the Lord, and beside them the young men were inviting people to kneel and pray to their cow. They drove the preachers crazy, all the more so when they said that the cow had been made from pages of Bibles torn from the hands of street preachers. Their sacrilege was deeply intentional and the preachers were outraged. The crowd was fascinated by the conflict, but nobody stopped to attend to either of their calls--nobody stepped up to be saved and nobody knelt down to pray, street-theater-style, to the cow. Off in the distance I could hear a hot dog vendor, one of those people who worked the job so long that he developed a song-like patter, calling out to the crowd. People were lining up for his wares. I remember thinking: His calling out is musical, and sells.