Word: accordions
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...light of these revelations, it seems odd that San Francisco, America's best-known earthquake center, has not taken the obvious course of compelling accordion players to register with the authorities. Instead, the board of supervisors has designated the accordion as the city's official instrument, thereby hastening the decline of San Francisco as we know it. Nothing more perverse has happened in that town since a woman collected $50,000 after claiming that a 1964 cable-car accident had transformed her into a nymphomaniac...
That the supervisors caved in indicates that the accordion lobby is as powerful as the National Rifle Association. That is no surprise, since both organizations favor unregulated possession of lethal instruments. At least it can be said for the N.R.A. that its members practice accuracy out of earshot, deep in the woods. They also wear earplugs to deaden the sound...
...Francisco is not the only epicenter of this distress. Deborah Norville, new co-anchor on the Today show and a closet accordion player, assaulted her audience with a blunt instrument rendition of the dreaded Lady of Spain. No earthquakes were reported, though the performance succeeded in further sinking the show's shaky Nielsens, while Norville's personal Richter rating slid glissando-style to C below low A, somewhere to the left of the keyboard...
...accordion ever managed to achieve respectability is still a matter that confounds world civilization. It was named in Vienna in 1829 by one Cyrillus Demian. Right away, it should have been called the discordion, but nobody anticipated the disaster that would befall. Little was heard of Demian after that, but it is easy to speculate that he was invited to leave Austria and settled in China in plenty of time for the earthquake season. The Red Cross has not yet been able to confirm this...
What can be confirmed is that despite the frantic opposition of music lovers, the accordion gained wide notoriety, prompting such otherwise sensible composers as Sergei Prokofiev and Virgil Thomson to write for the instrument. When their work fell on deafened ears, Serg and Virg realized they had made a terrible mistake and returned to more dignified pursuits...