|
 Herb
graciously spread his right arm around the table, indicating to
Loretta that all his friends needed their coffee cups topped off.
She would’ve done it anyway, of course, but this made him look …
generous.
“I’ve been reading up,” said Herb Collins, who had retired from his
pawn shop but not from reading up, “and I learned a thing or two.”
We settled back, in what we considered a learned and curious pose.
We probably weren’t, though.
For the more forward-looking members of the World Dilemma Think Tank
at the Mule Barn coffee shop, learning from Herb’s habit of reading
up sometimes was entertaining, if not always educational.
“How many of you fellas ever heard of Babe Ruth?” We all raised our
hands.
“Now how many of you fellas ever heard of Carl Ditters von
Dittersdorff?”
There was a paucity of paws in the air.
“He was born way-back sometime in a suburb of Vienna, and started
out life as Johann Carl Ditters. But through the years, and because
his compositions needed publicity, and his friends didn’t think his
name was impressive enough, he coagulated his name into what it now
says on the billboard at the opera house.” [to top of second
column] |
“And you read up on this by
yourself?”
“Sure did, Doc. Now ol’ Carl made a bunch of friends who were
musical and had weird names, too. Used to hang around with Christof
Willibald Gluck. Name like that, you’d have to pardner up with
someone who could handle himself in a dark alley. So there’s my
theory in a nutshell guys. If you were a German or a fake German
living in a close by, but not yet German country, and your name was
too common for people to remember, you either had to give them a
name they couldn’t forget … or go start a war.”
And some folks just watch teevee…
[Text from file received from
Slim Randles]
Free sheet
music from the ol’ Ditters himself! If you can play this, you’re
better than most mental patients.
https://imslp.org/wiki/Andante_cantabile_(Dittersdorf%2C_Carl_Ditters_von
|
