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Andy's Story For your enjoyment, as I received it. Dear Mike: Your regular giveaway comes along at exactly the right time. I don't know if the rules of your giveaway preclude my nominating myself, but I think when you read my story you'll agree that I've remained committed to the study and philosophy of the Ukulele under circumstances that would break the spirit of any mere mandolin player. I don't want to overstate my hardships. On the scale of what trombonists have to go through just to make it to the end of the day with their dignity intact, this is nothing; trombonists are hard men (even the women) and to their ilk, suffering is akin to the bread of life itself. But on a scale that most humans can understand, my path towards Ukulelelightenment has certainly been a twisty and perilous one. I swear to God that every single story I am about to tell you is totally, absolutely true...I totally swear to God. |
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DaSilva
Ukulele Co. email: mike@ukemaker.com Copyright
@ 2006 Michael DaSilva |
MY FIRST UKE I bought my very first uke a little over a year ago. I was on backpacking vacation through Italy and had a day to swing through Vatican City. I was browsing through one of the many pawn shops that adjoin St. Peter's Square when I spotted it hanging on the wall between a reel-to-reel deck and a samurai sword. I didn't know much about ukuleles but it was concert-scale and it had a painting of Johnny Cash on the back . Given that (a) I've always been a big fan of the Man in Black and (b) at the time the exchange rate was pretty sweet and a hundred bucks American could buy you your own Italian cable news channel, it was an irresistable impulse buy. I still had a lot a time to kill until my train left for Florence so I took an idle stroll around Vatican Plaza with the Johnny Cash ukulele tucked under my arm. Before long a came across about a dozen people standing in line for something. Well, back when I was in college I learned that when you see a line you should just get right in it and _then_ figure out whether it's headed anywhere good. But before I could ask somebody a question, one of the Swiss Guards rattled off something in Italian and suddenly we were all walking straight through the palace and being led into a small room room in the residential wing...to have a private audience with the Pope himself. Gosh! I should point out that I'm not actually Catholic. Still, a free blessing is a free blessing and I wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. I realized that with the uke in my mitts I wouldn't be able to put my hands together to pray. So I shifted it to my other hand while I knelt down and rummaged through my backpack to make room for it, and I guess I must have been holding the uke out a little because the Pope thought I was presenting it to him as a gift. Before I knew it, the Johnny Cash uke was in His Holiness' hands and he was strumming out the first few tentative chords of "A Boy Name Sue." And to the flustered consternation of the newly-appointed U.S. ambassador to the Vatican and his entourage His Holiness wandered back to his private quarters, gently strumming and humming.. I keep thinking about writing to the Vatican and explain the misunderstanding and ask for my ukulele back, but it's been about fourteen months and I suppose the man's sort of attached to it by now. Plus, thanks to the bungled photo op the Ambassador was recalled and my Uncle Carl got the appointment that should have been his to begin with. So I suppose I already got my 5000 lire worth out of it. MY SECOND UKE Needless to say that the time I had with my first uke did little to satisfy my curiosity about the instrument. So as soon as I got back home I visited Boston's legendary Ukulele District and bought another concert off the first pushcart I came across. I took to carrying my uke with me nearly everywhere and every time I had an idle moment I practiced the three chords I knew. Waiting for buses, waiting to get my driver's license renewed, waiting in a restaurant for the waiter to come over and inform me that after 72 minutes of waiting, Sir has definitely been stood up and unless Sir is willing to buy two $40 entrees immediately, then Sir is most welcome to try the Taco Bell across the street. One day I was sitting on a bench in Boston Common and strumming through "I'm Always Chasing Rainbows" (a special arrangement that I could play with nothing more than a C chord, an F, and another sort of F chord similar to the other one). I was missing more notes than I was hitting, but I made up for my incompetence with enthusiasm and volume. Eventually, a man walked by with his five-year-old son in tow. They listened for a minute or two and then the boy whispered something into his dad's ear. The father then motioned me to stop for a moment of conversation. "Have you ever heard of the Make-A-Wish Foundation?" he asked me. I admitted that I had. "My son's favorite movie is 'Animal House,'" he said, quickly adding "...the PG version edited for cable" before I could finish arching my eyebrow. "And he's always wanted to smash a guitar like Bluto does in the toga party scene." I noted that this was a concert ukulele, not a guitar, but the father eagerly said that his son was half the height of John Belushi so it'd be absolutely perfect. Well, what could I do? If it could make a little boy happy during one of his darkest moments, it was a small sacrifice to make. I handed it over to the delighted kid and after he rubbed an appreciative hand over its back he siezed it by the neck and whacked it against the park bench with all his strength, only a microsecond after I leaped clear. Then he smashed it against a lamp-post with the recoil, which was when he dashed it to the ground and started jumped up and down on it with tremendous vim. Finally he exhausted his energy and he handed me the neck -- the only part of the uke that remained (mostly) intact. And bless him...he shrugged his shoulders just like Bluto. "Sorry," he said, in character, and then he continued his stroll down the road. His father thanked me and told me that the boy's name was Stewie and that I'd probably made his whole week for him. "It must have done you some good too," I told him, "to see your kid so full of pep after battling such a serious illness for so long." The father started off after Stewie. "Oh, I never _said_ he was sick," he called back, and then he disappeared around the corner. MY THIRD UKE Well, I felt pretty foolish for letting my big heart cost me another ukulele. But I was able to continue my practice just a half an hour later. A somewhat shifty passer-by had witnessed the whole incident and, beckoning me to follow, he led me to a parked car with a trunk full of ukuleles. The price he was offering for a Martin-style concert ukulele was unbeatable. I had my suspicions though. I examined the box closely and it was just as I thought: there was no tax seal on the carton. These were clearly black-market instruments. But desperate times call for et cetera et cetera and I forked over the last $800 I had in my shoe, telling myself that at least I was keeping this ne'er-do-well from selling the uke to some innocent kid. I had the Martin-style uke with me when I took a bus junket from Wells, Maine to Orem, Utah. (The person who sold me this vacation package strongly implied that I'd be meeting a lot of former NHL all-stars along the route, but that's a story for another time and I suppose you can just watch Judge Judy two weeks from Wednesday like the rest of the country). We'd driven in the bus all night long without dinner. But it was going to be worth it because the first stop of the morning was the largest Waffle House franchise in Louisiana. According to the brochure included with my tour packet they had more than nine different types of boysenberry syrup alone, along with an electronic diorama of the crepe-making process which looked to be very educational and well worth the $980,000 in federal grant money that had been spent on its installation and maintenance. The bus lurched to a stop an hour ahead of schedule. I had the uke in my lap and was working on the chord progressions to "Everyone Says I Love You" much to the consternation of my seatmate, who was using the time to practice an all-banjo arrangement of "Love You, Says I And Everyone," causing much confusion. After a restless evening spent stifling the urge to kill either or both of us, the passengers could use a good excuse to stretch their legs so the whole tour group walked out to see just what the holdup was. We'd stopped just before passing under a railroad bridge. Apparently somewhere between Georgia and Louisiana the county highway system had switched from English to Metric units without telling the driver. Because the sign that had said "Low Bridge: Clearance 11 Feet" now read "Leau Bridge: Clarence 3.4M" and the driver suddenly wasn't sure whether or not the bus had too many Clarences on board to make it under the bridge safely. This impression was underscored by the impression that the bridge had made upon the bus. "Utah or Bust," the letters in the bus' destination window had said, and accurately or not the sign now advertised our preference for the latter option. The driver suggested that he simply turn the bus around, return to the main highway, and take the next exit instead, but to a plurality of the passengers (myself included) this seemed like a defeatist attitude. With the exception of the driver we all voted to keep moving forward. It was a pleasant, sunny day and perfect weather for riding with the top down anyway. The driver chose this moment to really dig his heels in and insisted that so long as he was driving this bus he had no intention of crashing it into a railroad bridge, and because he was able to run faster than anyone who tried to take the keys from him, we were forced to concede that he had a point. It was at this moment that I realized why the bridge looked so familiar to me: it looked just like every bridge in every Warner Brothers cartoon I'd ever seen. Which gave me an idea. We were blessed with a passenger list that was at least 30% above their ideal body weight, so I lined everybody up on the roadbed and on my command (which had to be repeated after explaining that it was "1...2...3" and jump _on_ three, not after it) we had all 40 passengers jumping up and down in unison, causing the steel bridge to bounce up in the air on its abutments at least a foot or two. So all we needed to do was get everybody to jump up and down again and then, during the third of a second that the bridge was in midair, we had to either (a) drive the bus forward fifty or sixty feet or (b) jam something between the bridge and its foundations to sort of shim it up the necessary distance so the bus could pass safely underneath it at our leisure. We took a quick measurement and figured out how much added height we should shoot for. It turned out that we needed to elevate it the exact height of a concert-scale ukulele, and as soon as this finding was announced I instantly regretted letting my banjo-playing seatmate handle the calculations. But I was just as eager to get to the Waffle House as anyone. So not wanting to let the team down, I shimmied up the abutment with my ukulele clenched in my teeth. The rest of the tour group lined up under the bridge as before, and with my seatmate counting down, they made their jump. I jammed the uke in at just the right instant: the bridge landed straight on the top of the neck. The thirty-ton impact caused my "F" string to go slightly slack, but I was going to tune it when we got to the Waffle House anyway. And what do you think happened? Everyone piled back into the bus and it drove safely under the bridge while I was still climbing back down. By the time I had my feet back on the ground, the bus was just a dot on the horizon. I could hear everyone singing "Ain't She Sweet" to a rather energetic banjo accompaniment, which is what really hurt. I was quite stuck. I needed those sixty people to bounce the bridge back up in the air again so I could retrieve my ukulele. As it was, I had to leave it behind -- it's still there holding up the bridge, as far as I know -- and I had to walk all the way to the Waffle House. When I finally arrived I insisted that everyone chip in for the cost of a new concert-scale uke, but I settled for having my breakfast comped by the tour company. MY FOURTH UKE It was going to be really inconvenient to travel back to Louisiana and visit that bridge every time I wanted to practice my uke technique, so I replaced it with another Concert uke, an instrument which the Treasury Department gave me in exchange for designing their new eleven-dollar bill (a new denomination intended specifically for use by cashiers in movie theaters, when patrons pay for a ticket with a twenty. It was a good idea but then the movie theaters upped their price another fifty cents and the whole scheme had to be abandoned). By now I'd learned my lesson about being a responsible ukulele owner and I was dead-dog determined to make this uke last a lifetime. I had owned and enjoyed it for nearly eleven weeks and was very proud of myself for my concerned and successful stewardship. I wanted to bring it with me on a business trip to LA but I wasn't going to take any chances: I actually bought my uke its own seat next to me on the plane, so it wouldn't get lost by the baggage handlers and it wouldn't get broken if someone stuffed a truck engine into a rollaway bag and tried to cantaliever it into the overhead compartment. The flight was overbooked, as it turned out. The airline wound up announcing that they were offering first-class upgrades to anyone willing to give up their Coach seats. I don't need to tell you that I was up at the podium in a flash, handing over my ticket folder and relishing the thought of spending the next six hours crossing the country in a huge leather chair wearing a pair of complimentary mink booties lined with complimentary caviar. The clerk behind the counter thanked me for volunteering and handed me two tickets back. But she'd only needed one more volunteer, so only one of them had been switched to First Class...and it was the seat that'd been assigned to my ukulele. Believe me, I argued the point long and hard. As a concert model the uke was larger than a soprano, but still at 24 inches in length it could hardly appreciate the extra width and legroom of first-class accomodations. But the new security rules put into place by the Department of Homeland Security meant that the airline couldn't allow me to fly using another person's boarding pass, and there were men with badges and guns nearby so I decided to let discretion be the better part of valor. When the plane landed and I disembarked I didn't see my uke in its assigned seat. I waited and waited by the baggage-claim carousel -- where else would the ukulele go, if it hoped to reconnect? -- another first-class passenger told me that the uke had apparently gotten a lot of attention from its seatmate: star of screen, stage and television Stockard Channing. Apparently they'd disembarked together. I pretended not to be hurt that my uke had ditched me. "If you love something, set it free" and all that. But it's been another seven months now and I haven't received so much as an email from the thing so I have to assume that wherever it is, my ukelele's found new happiness and that I should move on with my life. MY FIFTH UKE I bought a Lanakai from some dude on eBay and eight days later I accidentally sat on it. MY SIXTH UKE And this is where you come in. As you can see, I've put far more money into supporting the ukulele economy than the average citizen and while I'm more than willing to step up to the line with my wallet open a sixth time, my pocketbook just isn't up to the task. So I humbly put my history before you and say that while I've only been playing for less than a year now, I will strive to be worthy of your handcrafted instrument. Another Concert-scale uke would be great as that's the only size I've ever played, but any kindness would be accepted with great delight and gratitude. Anything would be better than the tennis racquet I've been practicing with since April. I, um, also promise to take better care of it than I did the others.
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