|
|
HOME | CONTENTS | SEARCH | POST
from: oprah
06 Oct 2006
19:09:17
71.237.222.119
Did you know that he only played harp because his mother insisted all her kids learn to play a musical instrument, and he chose harp because he thought it would be impossible for them to find one? The very next day, they found one in the trash on the lower East Side of Manhattan. (Everybody knows that Chico played a mean piano, but few know that Groucho was a damn good jazz guitarist.) Since nobody knew how to play the harp, Harpo came up with his own tuning and never had a lesson. Knowing that, it's all the more fun to watch him play. That's all completely homegrown, by-ear stuff. If you look carefully, in older movies he played one harp, and then he got a new one and played it the rest of his career, so he only played two harps in all his movies. That was because his oddball tuning kept him from playing anybody else's, so he had to travel with the damn thing. His most famous jokes about harps were; "Why are harps like elderly parents? Both are unforgiving and hard to get in and out of cars" and (to Milton Berle): "Know how to make a million dollars playing harp? Start with two million!"
