Joe and Pianos

Joe lived alone in the house his mother and father had bought in Oak Park, IL. Joe was 52 and had never been able to make many friends.

For many years, Joe was an aspiring writer of gags. Usually he wrote every day after having a glass of milk at the cafe. Often it was about pianos. Joe wrote:

Goes to show you, some musical instruments can go bad and get you when you least expect it. Today, a piano attacked without warning from the back of a piano moving truck at Harlem and Home Avenues, about 40 miles per hour. There was just a split second for a driver to hesitate a bit on the accelerator, but that was it. The piano hit the pavement with the flash and crash that sounded like the start of an epic Wagner concerto & the mayhem commenced. Ivory keys exploded, strings and sharp pieces of shaped wooden piano guts fighting with the cars as they ran over the thing. Renegade stand up piano took out 4 cars and a motorcyclist in 30 seconds flat. Not a few people in Oak Park will go home tonight and look at, say, a harpsichord and wonder when a seemingly innocent objects will SNAP.

He sat there for a few minutes, looking at what he wrote, tapping the pen to his teeth. Joe tried reworkng the writing, because he couldn't figure out why it was funny.

He fed the squirrels. He came back inside. The great piano attack story wasn't funny. It wasn't even true.

At about 11 PM, Joe tucked himself in.

He had a dream about naked ladies playing pianos. He blushed. He had no paper handy in his dream to write about the ladies playing the pianos.