My mother-in-law let a nugget slip at brunch this past weekend that was too amazing to pass up. She hired a spoon player. “You hired a what?” my sister-in-law asked.
“A spoon player,” my mother-in-law confirmed. “You know, those guys that play the spoons.”
Now my wife and sister-in-law laughed. Not me. I was in awe!
Turns out, her high school class reunion is coming up and they have hired a spoon player to entertain the crowd. Color me shocked. I didn’t know there were actual professional spoon players. I thought it was something grandpa did between dinner and desert at Thanksgiving in some folksy Hallmark movie. Or some guy in overalls tapping away in the transition between segments on Hee Haw back in the day.
But there are actual paid professional spoon players! That took me down a rabbit hole of web searching that lasted for hours. Turns out, there are famous spoon players like Abby the Spoon Lady and Artis the Spoonman.
There are even different types of spoon playing. There’s fire tongs style, salad serving style, Castanets style, and drumstick style. And here I thought you just banged them against your leg.
Jim Cruise will tune your spoons. He even has a YouTube video on how he does it and it’s a fascinating watch if you have nothing going in your life and are curious about the tuning of spoons—two things that accurately described me yesterday. In addition to his YouTube channel, Jim sells his stainless-steel musical spoons on Amazon and even spoon music t-shirts and hats!
A while back, I mentioned I wanted to learn how to play guitar and my wife laughed. I don’t think she took me seriously. Maybe I should learn the spoons instead. I wouldn’t need an amplifier and she wouldn’t be able to hear me practicing if I did it in my office. I think I will learn fire tongs style because that sounds more flamboyant. And if I’m going to be a spoon player, I need to have flair. I want to be the Elvis or Liberace of spoons. Or maybe the Eddie Van Halen of spoons. I want to play spoons at the Las Vegas Sphere and have U2 open up for me!
You have to have goals. Anyway, that’s all for this week. I need to tune my spoons.
Carry on, Citizens!
