Practical Jokes
Apart from his impressive playing style, Joe Venuti was almost as well known for his amusing practical jokes. He was well known to play inexpensive violins, since many of his former band members have said that he had been known to crack these over the heads of his players on occasion. There are many anecdotes of his humorous pranks fondly told by his associates. One of the best known tales was one in which he filled a tuba player’s horn with flour during a break in a rehearsal. Another involved sending a well-known one-armed trumpet player, Wingy Manone, a single cufflink for Christmas several years in a row. He was also well known for calling up every bass player in the New York phonebook and asking them to meet with him on a street corner. When over 50 bass players arrived with their instruments it created a minor roadblock. He then subsequently had to pay the players for their time as mandated by the AMF.
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Famous quotes containing the word practical:
“The city is always recruited from the country. The men in cities who are the centres of energy, the driving-wheels of trade, politics or practical arts, and the women of beauty and genius, are the children or grandchildren of farmers, and are spending the energies which their fathers’ hardy, silent life accumulated in frosty furrows in poverty, necessity and darkness.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)