Real Music & Real Estate . . .

Here are some gigs Yiddishe Cup, back in the day, almost played:

The Shrine to American Music, Vermillion, North Dakota
New York Mills (Minn.) Regional Cultural Center
Southern Cross International Music Festival, Brisbane, Australia
Austin (Tex.) JCC Israel Independence Day celebration
Klezmer Festival, Fuerth, Germany
Jewish Music Festival, Jackson Hole, Wyoming

All of them were close calls. Maybe we came in second. Second is a bear. For example, 30 clarinetists audition for the Kansas City Symphony and 29 clarinetists add “finalist” to their resumes.

Yidd Cup played Texas three times, Florida four times, and Missouri nine times. We’ve played abroad twice: New York City and Windsor, Ontario. The NYC gig was at the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts, and the Canada gig was the Windsor JCC.

Chanukah in Jackson Hole, WY. That was the subject line of an email I got. A Chabad rabbi in Wyoming asked Yiddishe Cup about doing a three-day Chanukah bash at three ski hotels. I immediately called the rabbi, gave him a price, and he seemed OK with it. I told the Yiddishe Cup musicians the Wyoming gig was 49 percent likely.

Yidd Cup’s singer said, “Forty-nine percent? That means you think it’s not going to happen.” (49% is where optimism meets realism.)

We didn’t get the gig. We didn’t get any of the gigs, but it was fun thinking about them. That Australia gig, in particular, was a cool gig.

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I told the plumber to check out a rusted-out waste stack in my basement. He cut the pipe in half and said, “Oops, it’s a support post.” My freaking house shook! This plumber was stupid, but I was, too, for telling him it was a waste stack when it was, in fact, a support post. The plumber said he’d take away the old support-post pipe, which he cut into two 30-pound cast-iron sections. Easier to move. But he left the stuff.

So I took the pipes to the tree lawn. No takers. Then I brought them back and called the city. I babysat the pipes for three week. The city guy said, “Put them out a day early this time, and they’ll be gone. Scrappers will take them.” I put the pipes out again.

Scrappers didn’t take them. I arranged with the city to take the pipes with a special pick-up. That happened. One less peeve.

And by the way, I got a new support post, so my house doesn’t shake now.

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Wendy from Dominion Retail said there were crazy numbers out there, regarding NYMEX natural-gas prices. Wendy’s competitors were offering the crazy numbers, she said, and she wouldn’t match them. Phil from Hess stopped by and said he could get me a gas contract at 3.99 Mcf, which Wendy claimed was “crazy,” as in she couldn’t match Phil’s low price. Phil said he could also get me a toy Hess truck, as in a matchbox toy. Phil — a goy — started in on Jewish things, about Israel and Hebrew. I said, “How did you know I’m Jewish?”

He said, “The basket of yarmulkes in the corner gives me an idea.”  (He was in my dining room.) Phil learned a new Hebrew word every day, he said. He had recently learned chuppah and ner tamid, and was on remant. I didn’t know remant. Still don’t. He said he could read Hebrew. I brought out a Bible, and he read the first line of Genesis. I didn’t press further.

Wendy decided to match Phil’s crazy number, but then backed off. So Phil locked me in at 3.99 Mcf, and he gave me the toy truck, plus honey for Rosh Hashanah. Previously I had been at 9.84 Mcf for natural gas. Now that was a crazy number (too high). I had been locked in at that high rate for the previous five years, 2009-14.

I only go out a year or two now. Or else I float. I’m at 3.39 now. Thank you, fracking.

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I’m Jay Gatz, but in reverse. You see, I moved from New York to the Midwest, specifically to Cleveland, and I changed my name. I used to be Justin Jacobson. Now I’m Bill Jones. Of course, I go by “William J. Jones,” too, whenever that seems appropriate.

I grew up in Manhattan at the San Remo, right next door to where Lennon was shot. My parents owned an art gallery. In fact, they owned two art galleries — one in Switzerland and one in New York. I ran the Zurich gallery for a while and met all the big names. But I got sick of New York and the entire gallery scene. Why? It was too effete. I wanted to hang out with “real people” — real estate guys, for example. I went to Ohio University. After college, I rented a one bedroom in Cleveland for $850. Tricked out, too. Marble countertops, dishwasher. I’ve been in Cleveland a couple years.

I hope to buy up the town — Cleveland. I can probably buy it for what my parents’ NYC apartment is worth. I’ve only made two errors in Cleveland: 1) I guessed wrong that a milk chute is for seltzer delivery, and 2) I didn’t know what tree lawn meant.

Cleveland is a cool town. Like Hoboken. Urban, but not too urban.

[fake profile]

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I remember Fail-Safe by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler. Who wrote the Fail part?

I remember Ted Williams could read the label on the ball.

When I was 10, I sent away to the Air Force Academy for a catalog and got one, along with an application.

I remember Larry and Norm Sherry of the Dodgers.

I remember Summit, the board game.

I remember Burger Chef.

I remember crepe dreidels hanging in the dining room.

I remember the Boy Scouts’ Life badge.

I remember my dad “hitting them out” to me in the park.

I remember playing “Exodus” on clarinet at the sixth-grade assembly. I also remember “Margie.”

I remember 1950-D nickels.

I remember “Hands Off Cuba” graffiti by the Rapid.

I remember slow-dancing to “Moon River” with a Christian Scientist.

I remember the Roxy.

I remember the JCC pop machine, and how it was frequently broken. The milk machine always worked. I drank a lot of chocolate milk. Maybe the useless pop machine was a parents’ conspiracy.

I remember Walter Lippmann in Newsweek.

I remember T.A. Davis tennis rackets.

I remember Rich Greenberg played Bobby McKinley — Chuck’s younger brother — in a national 16-and-under tennis tournament. Rich lost, but still, he played a McKinley.

I remember Harvey Greenberg got a 799 Math and 785 Verbal. (And this was before re-centering.)

I remember Chap’s GTO.

I remember Bruno Bornino’s “Big Beat” music column in the Cleveland Press. He also wrote “Pit Stop” about cars.

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When I arrived at my nursing-home gig, I noticed a 15-piece big band setting up next to me. I said to the nursing-home coordinator, “I don’t appreciate a 15-piece band playing 15 feet from me.” (The band was TOPS — Tough Old Pros.) These guys were stealing my turf!

The big boss — a programming director — came up to me and said, “I hear you have a problem.”

“I don’t appreciate a 15-piece band playing 15 feet from me,” I said. [The TOPS band was about 100 feet away.]

She said, “I hear you’re getting into it with my co-worker.”

“I didn’t swear at her. I didn’t say anything disrespectful. I did have an edge to my voice — like I do now. What did she say I said?”

“She said you said you don’t appreciate playing fifteen feet from a 15-piece band.”

“That’s right! What’s wrong with saying that? Are you doubling down on this?”

“We have six buildings on this campus and many musical acts and there can be conflicts.”

“A 15-piece band!” This was an ego thing for me, in case you haven’t guessed. “Maybe I’ll leave,” I said.

I didn’t. I like playing for senior citizens. I’m one myself.

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I lost my wallet and got it back quickly. I left the wallet on a bike path. Beachwood cops called.

I tried to give the finder a reward. I got his number from the cops. But the finder wouldn’t answer his phone. The police said he was a 47-year-old man from Woodmere, Ohio. He supposedly had told the cops, “If I lost my wallet, this is what I’d want.”

Nothing was taken from the wallet. The man deserved something. Matthew Lewis, 47, of Woodmere. I couldn’t find him. Granted, I didn’t spend hours on my search, but still, I put in time.

—

Yidd Cup Funk A Deli is at Fairmount Temple, Beachwood, Monday night for Simchat Torah, and Tuesday night at Park Syn, Pepper Pike.

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I spit wherever I want.

I go to the city dump for toilet seats and milk cartons. I’m a collagist.

I have sexy legs.

I own a big house and need another one. I’m seeing a realtor Friday.

I can’t read in the car. That’s a weakness.

I want to be Mr. Rogers, but not from Pittsburgh.

Rock-and-roll trivia is my forte. Also, baseball history. Pie Traynor!

I hate air conditioning. I wear a Speedo around the house in the summer.

My favorite movie is The Awning Fabricator. It’s Serbian.

Exercise sucks.

My girlfriend is sumptuous and intense, and a fugitive from my wife.

I often eat alone. My fav meal: Don’t have one.

My fav song: “Meshugeneh Mambo.”

Wednesday mornings I’m at Stone Oven, Eton Collection, Woodmere, Ohio. Stop in.

[fake profile]

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I backed up a star. A minor star. A minor, minor star: David “Dudu” Fisher. You’ve probably never heard of him, but he’s big in the Jewish music world, and he came to Cleveland and needed a backup band.

The usual Cleveland jazz dudes were called in to back up Dudu. These Cleveland guys play for touring Broadway shows at Playhouse Square and have music-school degrees. These musicians have bio notes that read “shared the stage with blah blah and blah blah.”

I’ve shared the stage, too. Yiddishe Cup played at a Dayton, Ohio, folk festival gig right before Jon Hendricks. War, too,  (Detroit) and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band (Akron). I haven’t actually played with anybody. Correction: a tune with Vulfpeck in Ann Arbor.

The reed player in the David “Dudu” Fisher backup band wasn’t comfortable with the clarinet charts. He was a jazz-sax guy and the klez clarinet parts were a bit too intricate. So I got a call. I practiced a lot and did OK. We read and improvised on jazz, klez and classical charts. I can read music! The pro jazz dudes said I did a good job. That meant something to me.

*”Dudu” is a Hebrew/Israeli diminutive for David.

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I was a bit stylish in seventh and eight grades. I shopped at Mister Jr.’s and Skall’s Men’s Wear at Cedar Center. After eighth grade, I gave up on making it in fashion. I couldn’t cut it — shopping, fashion and popularity contests.

One of my dad’s friends sold Farah pants. I liked Farah but Farah wasn’t cool. Nice feel but not cool. Lee –- the brand — was popular. Farah was the continental look — the greaser thing, like iridescent sharkskin. Italians clung to the continental look for years. Jews moved on to the “collegiate” look — Lee’s colored jeans.

Ben Skall, an old man, ran Skall’s Men’s Wear. He became a state senator. I gave up white socks to enter Skall’s. I bought black socks with gray rings around the top (Adler brand). Sam McDowell and Hawk Harrelson shopped at Skall’s.

I was in the in-between crowd. I noticed right off in seventh grade half the class was yiddlach, and these kids seemed “fast” and could dress, and they would mock you out if you dressed wrong. The dagos, my side of the tracks, dressed like Dean Martin or the Fonz (who came later). I wore a spread-shirt collar. Verboten amongst Jews and dagos. It had to be button down. So I went to Skall’s.

I wore a fisherman’s knit sweater my mom made. Homemade was verboten, too, I learned. But a girl complimented me on the sweater, so I kept wearing it. “Nice sweater,” she said. History!

I had a shirt jac and light blue denim pants. The shirt jac didn’t tuck in, by design.

Shoes? Pedwin cordovan penny loafers.

Sweaters: Alpaca was the continental look. Very Italian and very itchy. The collegiate look was a comfy cashmere-feel V-neck like a color called Summer Wheat.

Underwear? Yes.

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I didn’t go to Woodstock. Never even thought about going. Wasn’t into Woodstock, period. I disdained anything popular. That was me. (My future wife, Alice, went to Woodstock for a fraction of a day. She saw Richie Havens and left because Woodstock was too crowded. By the way, Richie Havens was OK with me because he wasn’t super popular.)

I saw most of the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, which was two weeks before Woodstock. I should have seen the whole blues festival but my sister got married in Cleveland the same weekend. The chutzpah. I had to bounce back and forth from the wedding to the festival. I was the blues festival’s PR chairman, so I placed ads in major daily newspapers, Coda (a Canadian jazz mag), underground newspapers and Rolling Stone. I got in touch with the Voice of America, which taped the event. (The tapes haven’t resurfaced. Some other tapes have. There is a  just-released live double album.)  I worked with an ad agency in downtown Cleveland — a guy there did ads for the key company my dad worked at.

First A2 Blues Festival, 1969.

The blues festival drew 20,000, and we spent about $60,000 from the University of Michigan and Canterbury House — an Episcopalian coffeehouse. That was a lot of money. ($419,000 in today’s terms.) I got a free trip out of it, to New York to talk to WNET. They weren’t interested in filming the festival because they had just done the Memphis Blues Festival.

Woodstock got a lot of ink because of the big crowd and the movie (1970).

Another national music festival in August 1969  was the Atlantic City Pop Festival. That drew about 100,000. Atlantic City Pop — you don’t hear much about that anymore. You don’t hear much about the Ann Arbor Blues Festival either.

The blues festival committee was U-M “blues freaks.” Most were Jews. University Activities Center — a student programming organization — ran an ad in the Daily that said hey-you-want-to-put-on-a-blues-festival? The student who placed that ad was Cary Gordon. He had a thing for Clifton Chenier. Gotta bring in Chenier! We did. And we brought in everybody else, too: Fred McDowell, Son House, Big Mama Thornton, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, and more. These old black musicians had a certain presence. They knew more about music and life than we did. Screw Woodstock.

*Speaking of old, B.B. King was 43. Son House was 67. Sleepy John Estes was the oldest at 70.

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KlezKanada is going on right now. Come on, America, let’s compete against the Canadians. Let’s do a full-blown Midwest klez conference. Not in Chicago, thank you, and not in some bubble town like Madison, Wisc., or Ann Arbor, Mich.

KlezKleveland. Where exactly? My house.

Accommodations: tent camping on my front lawn. There will be shower trucks and port-a-potties in the driveway. Don Johns — only the best.

Gentiles welcome, of course.

Do I need to play an instrument to attend?

No.

Do I need to know Yiddish?

Just chutzpah and putz.

Faculty?

Maybe. 

Sports?

Spinning to the music of KnishKnash, a NYC band.

Teen activities?

Yes. Teens will put on a play about scrap and Midwest Jews, based on Leonard Tanenbaum’s memoir, Junk is not a Four-Letter Word.

KlezKleveland ends with a fireworks display over Shaker Lakes. Look for a KlezKleveland flyer in your mailbox. Look for the next eight years.

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Bill Miller, who went to law school in South Dakota, wore a cowboy hat to our sons’ Little League games. Jews — the subject — came up, as it tends to around me. Bill ended our conversation with, “Think Yiddish, act British.” This was a new expression to my ears. Also, this guy — Bill Miller — was Jewish? Bill said he was inching his way back to the East Coast. He had lived in South Dakota, Iowa, and now Ohio. He had grown up on Long Island.

Bill got me to thinking about my personal “Think Yiddish, Act British” (TYAB) playbook. I had learned the cardinal rule of TYAB, courtesy of my mom: “Don’t make a scene.” If anybody in my family ever said “Jewish” in a restaurant, for instance, my mother would glance around to see if anybody heard. Forget Jew — the word — I rarely heard that growing up.

My dad couldn’t read (sound out) Hebrew. My mother could. My father’s parents were “basically communists,” an elderly cousin told me. That was a bit of an exaggeration. My grandparents were entrepreneurs with a socialist background. Par for the course.

We put out Easter eggs and got Christmas presents. No tree. No yelling. At High Holidays, my mom would write my teachers: “Please excuse Bert’s absence from school due to religious observances.” My temple held services on Sunday, not Saturday.

Jewish got more play beginning in 1967. I was surprised when my parents attended an emergency fundraiser for Israel. A lot of American Jews stepped forward during the Six-Day War. Abba Eban, at the U.N., was my hero. The possibility of a second Holocaust seemed very real. A couple kids in my high school began wearing Jewish Power buttons, courtesy of a button shop in Greenwich Village. I didn’t have the guts to wear the button. The button-wearing kids had grown up in the Jewish neighborhood, not with the Italians like I had. After the Israeli victory in 1967, the TYAB playbook became nearly obsolete.

At my dad’s funeral in 1986, my father’s brother Milt baited the officiating rabbi: “One place I’d never go is Israel.”

“Why is that?” the rabbi asked.

“Our mother was an ardent Zionist who wanted us to move there, and I didn’t want to.”

My mother questioned Milt’s propriety several hours later. According to my mom, 1) Uncle Milt’s mother had been a Zionist, but had never urged her kids to make aliyah. 2) Milt was a jackass for making a scene.

An etiolated version of TYAB was alive. But is TYAB in effect when you’re totally among Jews?

—

Yidd Cup/ Funk A Deli  plays a concert 7 pm Thurs, Aug. 15, at Walter Stinson Community Park. That’s somewhere in University Heights, Ohio. (hint: 2313Fenwick Rd.) Free. Outdoors.

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Cleveland was a hell for me last month. But not a bad hell. My mother lined up dates for me. The dates were with daughters of my mother’s friends. I took girls to bars and ordered 7&7s. That was my booze repertoire: 7&7.

I got feedback about the dates through back channels — info my mother gleaned at bridge games. Some girls liked me, some didn’t. One girl thought I was “a little weird.”

She was weird! She had no business dragging me through a military courtroom  — her dad’s den with World War II medals on the wall. “What are your plans? What do you do?” I wasn’t dating him.

What’s an apricot sour? That’s what I want to know. The daughter ordered that at the bar.

Right now I’m in Bodega Bay, California, sitting on the dock. A friend from college works at the marine lab here. I’m eating squid. Or maybe it’s a big snail. Wastin’ time?

—

2019 update: I stayed about a month in California and left for Latin America. I hitched and rode buses from Tijuana to Colombia. I stayed in Colombia a couple months, teaching English. In early 1974 I returned to Cleveland. My autobio: I Stayed in Cleveland.

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Dunk A Feli / Funk A Deli / Yiddishe Cup plays an outdoor concert 7 pm Thurs., Aug 15, in University Heights, Ohio.  Walter Stinson Community Park, 2313 Fenwick Road. Used to be a school site — Northwood. You can bring beer and wine to the show. And hopefully there will be free ice cream bars, too. We’ll play klezmer and soul music and a combination of the two.

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Beachwood, Ohio  1973

I live with my parents at the Mark IV, a high-rise apartment by the freeway. I’m living with my parents at age 23. I want to go to the North Pole. Chekhov said, “People do not go to the North Pole and fall off icebergs. They go to offices, quarrel with their wives and eat cabbage soup.”

My dad got mad at me because I didn’t want to save five dollars on traveler’s checks by shopping at various banks. “You aren’t a millionaire yet,” he said, scratching himself. He was wearing just underpants.

Tonight at a party — a parents’ party — Zoltan Rich, a Hungarian know-it-all, said, “The students protest for entirely selfish reasons. You know what the chief word is we’re missing — the key to the whole discussion? It’s obligation. Parents have abrogated their responsibility.”

It’s time to go. A guy from Case Western Reserve said he could give me a ride out west tomorrow. I won’t come back here for at least six months. My mother has a bridge game here tomorrow. If I’m within 100 feet of that game, I die.

I’ll try the Rand McNally approach to self-discovery . . .

It’s 3 a.m. in Utah and I’m sleeping under a picnic bench. I hear deer. Or bears? I hear semis shifting. What’s up? I don’t even like “freak” America. Deep down I’m straighter than David Eisenhower. I might wind up back in Cleveland. Or maybe I’ll settle out in California.

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Eric Krasner wanted to make a movie about Mickey Katz, the Cleveland-born klezmer clarinetist and comedian. Eric came to Cleveland from Atlanta to look around. He wanted to see where Mickey was born, and where Mickey’s wife grew up, and where Mickey’s father’s tailor shop had been. I said, “I’m not a filmmaker — and I don’t want to tell you what to do — but if you want another opinion, I don’t think you should show every place Mickey took a shit.”

1959 album

Eric and I visited the Euclid Avenue Temple (now Liberty Hill Baptist Church), where Mickey was married in 1930. Eric filmed the men’s room and said, “This is where Mickey urinated after his wedding.” Eric asked me why Katz (1909-1985) wasn’t more acclaimed in Cleveland. For one thing, Mickey is not well-known here. He’s not Bob Feller or Superman, or Pekar.

Eric and I went to Glenville, an East Side neighborhood where Mickey spent his teenage years. We found the Glenville Hall of Fame but no Mickey plaque. At Katz’s birthplace, near East 51st and Woodland, Eric drew a sign, “Birthplace of Mickey Katz 1909,” and hung it on a fence and filmed the sign.

Eric announced on Facebook he is giving up on the Mickey Katz film. Mickey’s son Joel Grey has declined to participate in Eric’s film, and that’s a big neg. The movie is toyt.

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I write about 50 business checks a month. The other day I hit check number 10,000. This made think of some old-timers (not me, other old timers).

I’ve had tenants whose personal checks went into the 8000s. I respected those people, their age, and their numbers. Also, I knew their checks wouldn’t bounce. The scariest check number is 101. Young tenants don’t even know how to write checks. I have to fill in certain lines for them.

That 10,000. Please respect it.

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I followed klezmer clarinetist Sid Beckerman around KlezKamp — the annual music conference in the Catskills. Sid talked to me. Big deal? Yes. Sid was paid staff, and I was just a paying student. Staff had a lot of demands on their time.

Sid had no ego. Sid was “discovered” by klez revivalists and made his first record at age 70. (He died in 2007 at 88.) Sid had a proprietary book of his own tunes. The book was nicknamed “the sheets,” short for “sheet music.” Sid’s sheets were guarded — quarantined — by pianist Pete Sokolow, who had transcribed the tunes.

Sid Beckerman 1998

I wanted a copy of the sheets, so I gave Pete a xerox of a 1938 magazine article about “Bay Mir Bistu Sheyn,” hoping to get in Pete’s good graces. Pete was not impressed. He said, “The sheets? What sheets? I’m so busy. I’m working up an arrangement for fifteen people. What did Sid say?”

Sid said, “What transcriptions?”

I offered Sid $20 for the sheets, which he turned down.

A year later, 1991, the sheets came out as the Klezmer Plus! Folio by Tara Publications. Everybody could now buy the sheets. Pete and Sid had just been protecting their intellectual property.

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Brian said he was good for the rent. He said, “I’m not like that [a deadbeat]. I pay. I’m an artist. I have $750 tied up in PayPal right now that won’t be released.” His paintings were dark and red like Franz Kline’s. He didn’t pay and I evicted him. The good news: he paid after the legal hearing, so he stuck around. I said, “Modigliani didn’t pay his rent either.”

“The guy who did the long faces?”

“Yep.”

Brian didn’t pay his rent the next month, so I evicted him again, and this time he moved  out, and left a wall of splattered paint, like Jackson Pollock. Also, he wrecked the bathroom floor because he never used the shower curtain. He left one painting, which I offered to the building manager.

The bailiff bumped into me at the city court and said, “Your tenant knocked over a couple display shelves in Drug Mart and is under psych observation for a couple weeks.”

“He’s already out of my apartment,” I said.

I told an employee about Brian. This worker liked to stay up-to-date on horror stories. The employee said, “There are two sides to this. Everybody is mentally ill.”

“He sold paintings in Germany on the internet,” I said.

“Everybody is a star on the internet. There are two sides.”

At least.

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The clarinet can injure your right thumb, which holds a disproportionate amount of weight when you’re standing. I had a pain in my thumb that lasted one and a half years. I drove to Cincinnati to see a specialist. Then I did Alexander Technique and every other technique short of amputation. The clarinet is not only the licorice stick, it’s also the agony stick.

Here are another couple reasons the clarinet is the agony stick: The fingering patterns for clarinet are harder than sax, and the clarinet has the “break,” the awkward leap from A to B in the middle register. And the clarinet sounds horrible the first year or two you play it. I asked a sax guy in a big band if he played clarinet. He said, “I have a clarinet.”

—–

Theodore “Toby” Stratton, age 67, 1984.

Hey, I have something else for you to read. My latest essay in City Journal.
The essay, “Beating My Dad,” is about how I hope to outlive my father.

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