{"id":14833,"date":"2012-08-08T08:00:49","date_gmt":"2012-08-08T12:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/?p=14833"},"modified":"2012-08-08T08:01:18","modified_gmt":"2012-08-08T12:01:18","slug":"the-annoying-entertainer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/the-annoying-entertainer\/","title":{"rendered":"The (Annoying) Entertainer"},"content":{"rendered":"<iframe class='youtube-player youtuber' type='text\/html' width='425' height='355' src='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/XaB9HfMN5h8?rel=0&amp;fs=1&amp;ap=%252526fmt%253D18' webkitAllowFullScreen mozallowfullscreen allowFullScreen frameborder='0'><\/iframe><p>Yesterday&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bostonherald.com\/entertainment\/music\/general\/view\/20220808hamlisch_left_his_signature_on_decades_of_films\/srvc=home&amp;position=recent\" target=\"_blank\">death of composer <strong>Marvin Hamlisch<\/strong><\/a> reminded me of one of the most annoying performances I&#8217;ve ever witnessed. Hamlisch, as you may have been reminded in reading about his life, adapted <strong>Scott Joplin<\/strong>&#8216;s music for the fine Robert Redford-Paul Newman film\u00a0<em>The Sting<\/em>.\u00a0It wasn&#8217;t the memory of an annoying performance by Hamlisch or any other professional musician that has haunted me over the last 24 hours but a 2-hour performance of the song on the piano in our living room by a 7-year-old boy.<\/p>\n<p>This was years ago. We had friends over for dinner. Our oldest son, who was also in first or second grade, had been taking piano lessons, Like any firstborn, he pleased his parents with painstaking renditions of the simplest 8-bar songs. He played something in the presence of our friends. They made the appropriate fuss over his performance. Then their son sat down to display his chops. This cherubic little boy banged out a perfect version of &#8220;The Entertainer.&#8221; We were dazzled and heaped on deserved praise. He played the song again, and we were delighted by his wind-up doll dedication. A few renditions later my ear-to-ear grin turned to horror. He kept playing &#8220;The Entertainer,&#8221; not pausing between takes, not varying his tempo or attack. It went on for a solid 2 hours as we tried to continue our dinner party. This became the most annoying performance I&#8217;d ever witnessed, topping (&#8220;bottoming?&#8221;) the self-indulgent preschooler behavior of\u00a0<strong>Victoria Williams<\/strong> at a small club in Philadelphia in the mid-1990s and any other annoying concert I&#8217;ve seen since. More annoying than the time I saw <strong>New Order<\/strong> and the drummer did nothing but occasionally play a swishy hi-hat over programmed drum beats when he wasn&#8217;t up from his kit, literally standing directly behind the woman on keyboards with his arms wrapped around her front, placing her index fingers on the appropriate keys for the band&#8217;s simplistic keyboard parts.<\/p>\n<p>To be fair, this young boy&#8217;s chops were astounding for such a tender age. To this day I&#8217;ve got nothing against this cool young man and son of great parents. However, 120 minutes of &#8220;The Entertainer&#8221; was 117 minutes too much of a good thing.<\/p>\n<p><em>What&#8217;s the most annoying performance you&#8217;ve ever seen?<\/em><\/p>\n<p>I look forward to your responses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday&#8217;s death of composer Marvin Hamlisch reminded me of one of the most annoying performances I&#8217;ve ever witnessed. Hamlisch, as you may have been reminded in reading about his life, adapted Scott Joplin&#8216;s music for the fine Robert Redford-Paul Newman film\u00a0The Sting.\u00a0It wasn&#8217;t the memory of an annoying performance by Hamlisch or any other professional <a href='https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/the-annoying-entertainer\/' class='excerpt-more'>[&#8230;]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[342],"tags":[170,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14833"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14833\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocktownhall.com\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}