I had a really bad dream last night. My beloved Boston Red Sox were losing in the league championship series and just then the TV broadcast broke to a commercial. Usually I hate commercial interruptions while I’m watching sports on TV but in this case it was a welcome respite from the pummeling that the Sox were taking.
The scene is a beautiful lake and two friends are rowing a boat back to a picturesque lakeside campsite. “How are your campfires going these days, Carol?”
“Well they weren’t all that good until recently, Pat. Now they’re so much better! You see, guitar and mandolin just haven’t been that rewarding for me so I talked to my doctor and she told me about banjo.” (soothing banjo music with an upbeat feel, followed by an authoritative background voice):
“Banjo is for people who mostly like bluegrass music and are not afraid of tackling an insanely difficult instrument. Don’t take banjo if you are allergic to it or any of its ingredients. Some mechanical skill is required to maintain banjo. Don’t take banjo if you have to operate heavy machinery as people may encourage you to drive your heavy machinery over banjo. Banjo should not be taken with drums or keyboard, else a serious interaction may occur. Tell your doctor if you have any friends who really hate bluegrass because playing banjo near them may cause a serious situation which could result in serious side effects including death. Some people taking banjo have experienced hallucinations with feelings of grandeur. Some have even imagined that they might be able to play other difficult instruments like the fiddle. Don’t take banjo if you are sensitive to cartoons mocking the limited intelligence of banjo players.”
The time is now. What have you been waiting for? Ask your doctor about banjo. (Fade to campground full of happy campers beckoning to new banjo pickers to join their jam).
It’s so much fun for me, as a recently practicing physician, to mock those direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical commercials. If I were surgeon general, the very first thing I would do would be to lobby for the banning of such commercials. Honestly, I have never seen anything beneficial result from these ads. At least not from the patient’s perspective. From my perspective, such ads breed only confusion, delay and unnecessary cost to patients and insurers.
But I do wish we had more banjo pickers out there. Bluegrass needs banjo more than any other instrument to really sound like bluegrass and there are few people willing to pick up that mantle these days. So all you pickers out there eager to try a new instrument. Ask your doctor (in this case maybe “Dr. Banjo” AKA Pete Wernick) about banjo. I hope the doctor can get your insurance to pay for it.
