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
