my $3 miracle

[Jennifer Lee Davies <jen@nt.net>]

        I go to yard sales.  I love them.  Northern Ontario has the best
ones in the province (trust me - I've tried them everywhere).
        At one that my mother didn't even want to go to, I found a beat-up
guitar.  Its paint is badly chipped, it had something green and hard stuck
to one side (look like really old spinach), and it was coated with at least
5 years' worth of dust.  But for $3 (bargained down from $5), I took it home
and hoped at the least, when I cleaned it up, it could hang on my wall.  I
had to take it - I couldn't stand to see the poor thing suffer any longer!
        Anyway, I cleaned it up and a khaki yellow became kind of a sunny
yellow, the green stuff came off, and the dust did fall away.  It isn't bad
looking!  (The scratch plate is metal, but it has pinstripes - kinda cute!)
I bought strings for the thing at Radio Shack (some really light gage
el-cheapo Fenders), just to pretty it up a bit, and asked my dad to come
over and show me how to string it.  (He informed me that the whammy bar is
missing - I didn't know it should have had one.  I couldn't tell.)
        He strung it for me (well, I could have done it myself after seeing
the first one, but he did it anyway), and just for kicks we plugged it into
my keyboard amp (which just happens to run on mono cable, like the guitar).
        Lo and behold, the guitar broadcast a sound to that amp.
        It's alive.  It's ALIVE!!!
        So, I have me a $3 miracle - an electric guitar.  With a new whammy
bar (the whammy system works - my dad used him thumb to move it) and a
little re-wiring of the volume control (which I'm not crazy enough to do
myself), it'll be perfectly good!
        But I won't be trying windmilling yet.  I'll wait 'til I'm 19 and
really drunk, so at least I can blame the booze when I bleed.  ;)

        And on a totally different note, I was watching the 1989 LA Tommy
video, and noticed that Roger is wearing a scarf worthy of Tom Baker!

JenniferD
My Guitar         __   ____
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