You Wynn Some, You Lose Some

My new profession is counter help at a local music store here in cinSity. It turns out that this job is really the only thing I'm qualified to do (which is both kind of sad and kind of funny all at once), so, while I'm caught in limbo between now and when I get back to school in the spring, I'm a retail man, and so far, these two things have happened....

Yesterday, a woman came up to the counter to pay for her son's guitar lessons. We have a computerized database that tracks this sort of account, and in order to correctly place the payment, I had to do this: "Great. What's your last name?"

"Wynn."

"Okay... and your first name?"

"Elaine. Or it might be under my husband's name... Steve."

Those amongst you who watch LVTV (the bastard child of the Discovery Channel that some call the Travel Channel) might recognize the name Steve Wynn. I'm sure you know who he is. No? Oh, all right. Well, first he owned the Golden Nugget, then the Mirage (and, of course, TI), then Bellagio, and, most recently, Wynn Las Vegas. All these, and also a half-sized kiddie guitar.

Then, today, this guy came in looking for a job. I'm sympathetic to this sort of thing (having recently been there myself), so I talked to him. Turns out he was one of those guys who just really likes to talk to the people behind the counters in stores, and he proceeded to say essentially nothing to me very completely over the course of the next forty-five minutes or so. At one point, he was talking to me about how he would like to learn how to give music lessons, because he thinks it's a good way to make money. "Can you recommend a good book that would go through, you know, step-by-step how to teach somebody something like music?"

"You mean a book that says how to teach?"

"Yeah, you know. Sort of a step-by-step kind of thing. Can you recommend one?"

"Well, not really off the top of my head, no. It's kind of a complicated thing to get down in just a book... if you really wanted to learn, they have music education classes over at the University."

"Yeah, yeah, I've seen those. Like, I've seen them advertised as like a way to learn how to teach music. Do you know what book they use over there? It's gotta be like a step-by-step kind of thing."

"You know, I don't. You could go over to the bookstore, though, I guess." And all the while, I'm thinking to myself: they don't even really tell you how to teach in education classes... I can't imagine that there's a book. We finally got rid of the guy, but he was really sure that somebody would be able to turn him on to a step-by-step guide that reveals the secrets of teaching people music.

The shop is actually a pretty interesting place. Like, for another example, there's this guy Ed Grell who likes to talk about all the time he spent at the Fillmore Auditorium listening to Jefferson Airplane and Led Zeppelin during the Acid Wave in the Sixties, about what it was like to tour with The Righteous Brothers for five years, about what a great gig it was being in the house band at The Plaza for nine years, and about how crazy it is that he was Will Ferrell's babysitter. Yeah, he did all that stuff. But that's a story for another time.