Hey, It’s All About the Twang

I have been looking for a new sport ever since my doctor put an end to my hang gliding (I landed inside a corn silo on a farm near my place and got some nasty scrapes) and now I think I have found it in New York.

Several dozen competitors from around the world took turns Sunday hurling a sacrificial banjo into a polluted urban canal to see who could throw it the farthest. Tyler Frank of St. Louis bested all other male competitors with an 85-foot throw. On the women’s side, Nada Zimmerman of Innsbruck, Austria, tossed the banjo 67 feet into Brooklyn’s Gowanus Canal.

Two things: I want to hire Tyler to tutor me and I am madly in love with Nada.

Event founder, banjo player and radio host Eli Smith, says, “I love the banjo, and yet I have a perverse desire to see it thrown into a body of water.”

I don’t see anything perverse about that at all. So, I’ll be down at the Avon River practising tonight. I just hope I don’t hit a duck or a dragon boater.

Finally, my sport. Shows if you are patient, the right one will come along.

An old joke says the definition of perfect pitch is tossing an accordion in a dumpster and hitting a set of bagpipes with it. Musical instrument jokesters can be so cruel these days. May a flying banjo clonk them in their noggins the next time they’re padding down a polluted river and in their mental haze that follows, they hear the dueling banjos theme from the movie Deliverance.

©2015 Jim Hagarty

Author: Jim Hagarty

I am a 72-year-old retired journalist, busy recovering from a lifelong career as an unretired journalist. This year marks a half century of my scratching out little fables about life. My interests include genealogy, humour and music. I live in a little blue shack in Canada and spend most of my time trying to stay out of trouble. I am not that good at it. I also spent years teaching journalism. Poor state of journalism today: My fault. I have a family I don't deserve, a dog that adores me, and two cars the junk yard refuses to accept. My prized possessions include my old guitar and a razor my Dad gave me when I was 14 and which I still use when I bother to shave. Oh, and my great-great-grandfather's blackthorn stick he brought from Ireland in the 1850s. I have only one opinion but it is a good one: People take too many showers.