The strongest hands in the world

So in retrospect maybe taking a banjo and cake decorating class at the same time was not such a good idea. Or maybe it is the best idea ever! I could end up with the world's strongest hands.

I started to make parallels between cake decorating and playing the banjo. Both involve hand pressure. The pastry bag has to be held with just the right amount of pressure so that the flow of icing comes out smoothly. When playing the banjo your fingers have to be placed on the frets just so in order for the tones to come out correctly. Both make your hands hurt from practice. But only one do you get all over the place and the opportunity to eat your mistakes.

Perhaps I should start using a stress ball during the day in an effort to strengthen my hands even more! Or get one of those muscle man hand squeezers. You know the triangle shaped one with the spring on it? Yep one of those. Let me know if you see one.

i came, i saw, i banjo-d! banjoed? whatever.

so, when banjobarb says 'dragged', she maybe exaggerates a little.  i am a willing participant in this thing!  i mean, who doesn't love the BANJO, for god's sake?  have you *seen* the muppet movie?  come on.  anyway.  last night was our first class.

while banjoleon predictably has his own banjo already (you didn't see that coming?), banjobarb and i are renters from our school's store.  very helpfully, the guy who hooked us up seemed knowledgeable and totally tuned our banjos for us -- so when we got to the class and everyone else was fumbling around and the instructor was going around from person to person saying things like 'higher, higher, no, higher still, keep going, higher, no!  stop!  too high!  go back the other way.  lower.  stop!  now higher!  no, now lower again'  (no lie, at one point he dropped to his knees to illustrate a point), he got to us and was like -- great!  this side of the room is good.  it was like we scored points without even trying.

it was awesome to start with that small positive, because there was a lot of not great music happening in that class, and i know for a fact that quite a bit of it was coming from *my* banjo.  maybe it's just because i haven't named it yet?  but!  we learned the basic clawhammer technique (relax your hands, yo), a few chords (G is seriously the best, you guys, because you DON'T HAVE TO USE THE FRETS AT ALL), and then we practiced a song together and even SANG a little bit.  in a kind of inhibited, slightly embarrassed way.  and it was good, clean, awkward fun!  i mean, i'm pretty far away from backing up like, langhorne slim or anything, and i think for the next couple of days i might not actually have fingerprints on the index and middle fingers of my left hand, but . . . all in all, i'm feeling uncharacteristically optimistic about this experiment.

and next week we're starting MELODIES.  yeah, you heard me.  melodies.  tell your friends.

Not sure how this all started

I am not sure where my love of the banjo came from. Maybe there is a banjo gene? My parents took me to Dollywood when I was younger, could that be it? Or is it because my dad is from West Virginia? Perhaps it all started when I first heard, "Foggy Mountain Breakdown". Somewhere in the midst off all these things I decided to learn to play the banjo. Mind you I have never played an instrument. But here I am dragging Banjulie and Banjoleon along for the ride.