Word: pianos
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Sondheim's fascination with the theater reaches back to a day in 1939 when his father took Stephen, 9, to see a Broadway musical, Very Warm for May. He recalls, "The curtain went up and revealed a piano. A butler took a duster and brushed it up, tinkling the keys. I thought that was thrilling." That moment, a few months before his parents' divorce, was one of the few distinctly happy ones from a latchkey childhood: "I did not have an unhappy time, because it literally did not occur to me that other people had a family life...
Late at night a college radio station discourses brilliantly on Rachmaninoff's piano technique. Whole regions, with accents and traditions and communities of their own, come in over the air, echoes of reality in the netherworld...
...Soviet Union's most promising young pianists. Then he applied to the authorities for an emigration visa. Suddenly his engagements were canceled, his recordings yanked off the radio. Even a private performance at Spaso House, the U.S. Ambassador's official residence in Moscow, was marred when the piano was mysteriously vandalized before the concert. Apart from a few performances, mostly on battered uprights in remote villages, Feltsman was a musical nonperson...
...shows usually offer a variety of delights: Lily Tomlin and Whoopi Goldberg impersonated scores of different women; Victor Borge played the piano between monologues. Jackie Mason is only Jackie Mason, a hunched and tuneless figure towering some 5 ft. 4 in. above sea level and speaking with the Yiddish locutions of an immigrant who just completed a course in English. By mail. His targets are ecumenical. On Jews and Christians: "You show a gentile carrots and peas, he eats carrots and peas. You show a Jew carrots and peas: 'Wait a minute. Why are there so many carrots compared...
...baker buys a piano because he cannot make one, and yet, rightly or wrongly, he judges the possession of a piano to be necessary for his pleasure, stature, worth. The piano maker, in turn, may buy TIME magazine because, rightly or wrongly, he deems TIME necessary for his pleasure, stature, worth. Only God knows who gets the better of such deals, but the fact is that the deals are not only economic but social transactions, which have been conducted continually since the first tradesman said to a customer, "I will not give you what I have done for nothing...