spynotes ::
  October 16, 2006
The ruin of many a poor girl

I should have known that after writing about my recent love affair with the acoustic guitar that I would have ended up at the absolute worst end of the acoustic guitar spectrum less than two hours after posting: the Catholic guitar Mass.

The Guitar Mass is right up there with the Crusades and pedophilia as one of the worst crimes committed by the Catholic Church. And this was an especially bad guitar Mass � 6 singers failing miserably to harmonize or even stay in a key remotely related to the one they were supposed to be in. Only the inexplicable flutist was anywhere near her mark. It was so bad, it was hilarious. I had a burning desire to yell out, �Stairway to Heaven,� with a flick of a cigarette lighter, but I didn�t have the nerve. Instead, I bit my lip to keep from laughing. My lip was bleeding by the end of the service.

My love affair with acoustic guitar is not actually recent � it�s a lifelong affair that gets rekindled every now and again. Many of my friends and pretty much anyone I had a crush on in high school and college played guitar.

* Marty, a nerdy animator with beautiful hands who was a fellow teacher at one of my summer jobs, and who would play Suzanne Vega and Cat Stevens songs while I sang. He was a lot older than I was, but I didn�t care. So were most of my friends then. I�ve written about Marty on this page before, but I can�t seem to find it now. I�m not sure if I really had a crush on him exactly, but he was magnetic.

*Sher was a real guitarist of the jazz variety who worked with Marty and I that same summer. I didn�t have a crush on her, but I did kind of want to be her. She was at the time studying at Berklee in Boston. When I�d go up to visit her, we�d end up slipping into lots of clubs for free to see her friends play. One night late we were out with a friend of hers who worked at Fenway Park. At 3 a.m. he let us in and we ran around the infield. It�s still the only time I�ve been in Fenway Park. And I�ve always wondered whether this guy got fired for letting us in. Sher gave me a whole bunch of her LPs when she was upgrading to CDs. Half of my best records were her hand-me-downs. Thanks, Sher, for Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Joni Mitchell, Pat Metheny, and the Sergeant Pepper album your sister gave you after you wrote all over it with a ball point pen. I still have them all.

* Rich, a guitarist I knew in college and afterwards. He was a wonderful guitarist but his head was in the clouds. He made me many mix tapes with lots of acoustic tracks and I would read many meanings into them that probably weren�t there. He wrote music for us to play together. I read less into that, because most of the music wasn�t very good. But it was fun nonetheless. I ended up dating a friend of his instead, who had a crush on me but bored me to tears. I probably sold him short, though, because he couldn�t play the guitar.

* Bob, a friend from grad school. I didn�t have a crush on him, although he was a good friend � he was definitely in the collegial or brotherly camp. My best friend and I had apartments across the hall from one another. He moved into our building a year or two later. But my best friend and I took to calling him the Minstrel of Luv because every time he was interested in a girl, out came the guitar. He�s married with a few kids now. I wonder if he still plays?

* I once went on an absolutely dreadful date with someone I met through a personals ad (it was a definite low point in my life � I was trying to get over a hideous break-up by refusing to stay home for more than five minutes). But the guy played the guitar, so I agreed to see him again simply because he played guitar and I thought that meant he must have a soul in there somewhere (he didn�t).

Strangely, I married a guy who�s never had a music lesson. But after we�d been married for a couple of years, I discovered a secret � he had a guitar sitting in his mother�s basement, a Sears mail-order guitar. The guitar is now sitting on a stand in the far corner of my office, next to the keyboard. Every now and then I pick it up and try to play �House of the Rising Sun.�

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