This is a transcript of the set/story I did on Monday night at Linda Bailey Walsh's FACEBOOK'ed Show at M Bar. It was a really fun show. All stories based on Facebook. Everyone was great! You should have been there!!
The first half was a rant. The second half is the story of the violin.
A brief history of Mankind:
Cavemen - Grunting - Painting - Hieroglyphics - Talking - Language - Writing - Printing - Telegraph - Telephone - Radio - TV - Computers - Internet - AOL - Chat - Friendster - Myspace - Facebook..
Facebook - which brings us back to the beginning with character-count-limited, electronic grunting: "...uuurr LIKE!" "...uuurrr FRRRIIIEND.." Will you come to my show on Friday night? "uuuuurrr - MAAAAAYBEEEE..." We've evolved to sharing videos of cats playing patty-cake, which, undoubtedly, cavemen also enjoyed watching, albeit live only.
Facebook - so simple that even super-religious people can use it. It makes me miss the days when the internet was the devil's playground and not to be touched by wholesome hands. Now, the uber-religious feel comfortable and free to proselytize, evangelize, and save the world through commenting on my status updates.
Facebook - the great equalizer. Everyone's layout is the same. When the web was invented and growing, the opportunity arose for individuality to blossom. Everyone could have their own site or blog. Myspace was filled with beautiful sparkles and squiggly ribbons! But we've ended up here: all of us in the same generic, bland, milquetoast web-clothing, like a city of workers portrayed in a painting entitled "Salute to Stalin," our Facebook uniform here of white pants, white shirt, blue belt and blue cap, just a face to show ourselves, a profile pict we can swap out once in a while as we type out an occasional emoticon just to show people that we're still alive.
How many people here drive a car that is silver or gray-tone? .... --- SHEEP!!
Facebook is our Egalitarian comfort zone. All things equal. So I'm an Anti-Egalitarian. Not that I don't believe that all people are created equal and deserve equal opportunity and justice - of course! But I also believe that a great many of us fuck up a great many things along the way - my very own life a fine example of a decades-long string of unfortunate decisions - making us eventually extremely unequal. This is why high school reunions are so damned uncomfortable!
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But Facebook can be used for good as well as life-wasting time suckage...
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The Girl Who'd Lost Her Violin
One evening a few weeks ago, I was driving to a party - turning left off of Fairfax, onto Melrose Avenue. I saw the cars in front of me swerving and braking to avoid an object in the street. It was something pretty large. I thought it was a piece of a car fender or something. So, having many sins for which to amend, I pulled over, figuring that clearing the street would make me feel better as a human being, and that I could go to the party telling people that I had, presumably, saved countless lives on my way there.
It was at the corner of Genesee and Melrose in front of the American Apparel store. I stepped out of the car, the scene gently lit by the soft reflections of fluorescent light that bounced off of the plastic, scantily clad, post-pubescent, morally questionable mannequins in the window. What I found was not a car fender or "debris" of any kind. It was a violin case - a nice one, and relatively unharmed. Then, a few feet away, I saw the bow, and several yards from that the violin itself.
The Girl Who'd Lost Her Violin
One evening a few weeks ago, I was driving to a party - turning left off of Fairfax, onto Melrose Avenue. I saw the cars in front of me swerving and braking to avoid an object in the street. It was something pretty large. I thought it was a piece of a car fender or something. So, having many sins for which to amend, I pulled over, figuring that clearing the street would make me feel better as a human being, and that I could go to the party telling people that I had, presumably, saved countless lives on my way there.
It was at the corner of Genesee and Melrose in front of the American Apparel store. I stepped out of the car, the scene gently lit by the soft reflections of fluorescent light that bounced off of the plastic, scantily clad, post-pubescent, morally questionable mannequins in the window. What I found was not a car fender or "debris" of any kind. It was a violin case - a nice one, and relatively unharmed. Then, a few feet away, I saw the bow, and several yards from that the violin itself.
My mother was a violin teacher, a public school music teacher who taught private lessons in our house. She was a tough lady - a combination of Hillary Clinton and Pope Gregory IX. Above the door to the bedroom which my brother Chris and I shared, she'd hung a wrought iron sign which read "Homework is Freedom." She was a perfectionist and a persecutor. If I ever said, "Hey, Mom, guess what I got on my spelling test today?" She'd inevitably come back with, "100?", to which I'd have to sullenly reply, "No ..a 98." And then, ..here it comes, "Oh, Richard, you always manage to get one wrong." This is why I have both a fear of success and a deep hatred of even mildly successful people.
At home when her private students were there, it was a lifetime of the inescapable cat-screams of beginners learning to play. Early-stage violin playing is like listening to Kathy Griffin talk about sex. My mother had one young Vietnamese student named Peter. She taught all three of that recent-immigrant-family's children. They were named Peter, Paul and Mary. Paul and Mary were amazing students. To relax before his lesson, Paul used to take apart our calculator and put it back together again. But Peter could never quite get it right. "No, Peter! No! Nooo!!" my Mom would yell. Yes, she had patience sometimes, but Peter had pushed her beyond it right from the beginning. "Nooooooo!!!"... I can still hear that screaming! Today, my neighbor, Irene, futilely yells at her Yorkie, Lauren, to stop barking, and it's, "LAUUUUREN, NOOOOOO!! NoooooOOO!!" just like my Mom with Peter. My shower head has been leaking for weeks, and I hear it again! - I wake up at night screaming, "Shower, NOOOOO! NoooOO, shower!!" My stomach started growling at a film screening the other day, and I knee-jerked, "Stomach! Noo!! Noooooooo, STOMACH!!"
I stood in the street and held this ownerless violin in my hands. Was this a sign from my mother? Whose violin could this be? And how does one lose a violin? You don't just wander aimlessly away from it like Steve Carell from "The Office." It doesn't just float away like Donald Trump's grasp on reality. It's not disposable like Jennifer Aniston's filmography.
There was a name in the case, as well as "Violin 1." So this girl was a talented violinist on some level. I was right near Fairfax High. So that Monday I took the violin there, but the principal said they had no student by the name on the card, and the music teacher couldn't identify the violin or case. I turned to FB because earlier in the year I'd found a wallet while I was running, and I was able to return it to the owner via a FB search. My reward for that return was a giant chocolate-chip cookie. I sat on my sofa eating it with a big glass of milk, and it felt so good. I thought, "This must be what Kim Kardashian feels like.." It was nice. Inspired by myself, I typed the name into the FB search, but no results returned. It was a very unusual last name, so I searched just it instead. After pursuing many profiles, I messaged a woman in Santa Monica who might have been old enough to have a teenage daughter. She called me right away. She said that her daughter had been crying for days. I asked what her daughter had said about the violin? She told me that her daughter had told her that the violin was taken by a nanny named "Zenaida Fernandez-Gonzalez," and that she'd been trying to recover it on her own, but that was very stupid... Okay, she didn't actually say that. (That was for my #CaseyAnthony case people.) She said her daughter had been crying for days, and she didn't know why.
The next day they appreciatively picked up the violin. The daughter seemed very, very bright. She reminded me of some of my mom's best students. She and her mother were adorable together - and so relieved. I'm a musician. A person gets very attached to his personal instrument. It's a relationship, and I could see that she was glad that her violin would not have to be replaced. They gave me a $25 Starbucks gift certificate. I wished I still had my giant cookie; the two would have gone so well together.
This was a sign from my mom, but it wasn't to help me. - She was calling out to me to help the girl who'd lost her violin.
