I was languishing in my Tokyo hotel room with three days off, eight weeks into a thirteen week Far East tour, too lazy to practice, and too hazy to dope out the complicated looking TV remote controller, settling instead on watching the channel I was stuck on. For the life of me, I was unable to surmise what the objective might be on the wacky game show I’d been drawn into. From what I could gather, a woman contestant was challenged to remove one article of clothing after another, each article chosen arbitrarily by a panel of 4 giggling adult men.
As the dermal coverage grew increasingly scant, in fact, shrinking to such a scandalous state that the obfuscating fingers of the blushing beauty remained modesty’s final line of defense, Joe G. my trumpet section mate (with the Liza Minnelli band) knocked on the door. I let him in and, breathless, he began excitedly detailing his scheme. We were to depart the hotel at once, leap onto the next bullet train headed for Hamamatsu, and then strut confidently into the Yamaha Musical Instrument factory, explaining to them just how important we thought we were.
As they stumble over each other, trundling out palettes stacked high with trumpets for our delectation, we narrow the aggregate down to the two finest of the bunch. After they’ve cleared away the rejects, the engineers, factory craftsmen, and executives huddle together in discreet
