40: Lessons
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"From PRI, Public Radio International. "From PRI, Public Radio International." "Public Radio International." Here is the dream, expressed as concisely I think as anybody ever has expressed it. I hold it in my hand, a handwritten sign. It was photocopied and pasted up around the San Francisco area. In big letters at the top it says, "Play guitar for $5." There are two underlines underneath that. Then in smaller letters underneath it says, "I don't give guitar lessons. I give one lesson." In that lesson, I will teach you three chords for five bucks. Every see those mindless junkies up on stage banging out that preadolescent bull, waving their hair around, getting free drinks and other favors. Are they better than you? Because they know three chords and you don't. So for a quarter of what you'd spend getting drunk and watching their crappy band, I'll teach you all you need to know. If you're sick of talking, I want to start rocking. Give me a call and give me a five and I'll show you how. And then underneath the guy's name Michael Dean, punk rock and roll fantasy camp, and his phone number, and the important words which follow, "Call it noon only, underlying only." I bring it up here, by the way, this is from W.B. Easy Chicago, this American life in my red glass. I bring it up here because this is the dream. This right here, this sums it up. The dream of what we want when we start taking classes. Our dream is it's going to be easy, it's going to be quick, it's going to be cheap, and that we're going to be transformed by someone who is completely confident of that fact. He's just going to give it to us and then it's just going to happen and then we're going to be done. This is the dream that we carry with us into any kind of lessons of any sort. Guitar, dancing, tennis, meditation, pottery, screen play writing. Well, we are back here on our program. For another week, documenting everyday life in these United States, each week as you know, we choose a theme, invite a variety of writers and performers and documentary producers to take a whack at that theme. Today's theme is lessons, act one, ski lessons, and in that act we are pleased to bring in Spalding Gray, a man who is sometimes called the premier teller of monologues in America, act two, swimming lesson. That'll be a story from our own Scott Carrier. Act three, how to fire a potato in a graceful arc, 450 feet in the air, a lesson on hat, act four. Now, we'll just get to act four when we do it. Stick around and learn, okay? Yeah, you can tell we're having the big star on today, because we're using the big movie music, cleaglyte sweeping across the studio ceiling. I wish you could see it in here. It is actually, I've got to turn this music off. One over a second, I'm just going to take that out. Let me switch to another song here.
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