{"id":1030,"date":"2009-01-03T17:22:00","date_gmt":"2009-01-04T00:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wendybrandes.com\/blog\/?p=1030"},"modified":"2014-06-11T01:23:57","modified_gmt":"2014-06-11T05:23:57","slug":"having-wank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wendybrandes.com\/blog\/2009\/01\/having-wank\/","title":{"rendered":"Having a Wank"},"content":{"rendered":"

I took guitar lessons for eight years. I didn’t become proficient because I never practiced. I would get out my candy-apple red Fender Strat<\/a> exactly once a week when I trudged the ten blocks to see Ed, my good-natured guitar teacher. I kept this up until I left the corporate world and started working for myself, at which point I fell prey to the time-warping qualities of the unstructured life, wherein the more time you have, the less you manage to do with it. Never did learn French either.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I often consider going back to lessons with Ed. During these considerations, I also think about British comedian\/actor\/musician Dudley Moore. Dudley first came to prominence as a writer and performer of the 1960s theatrical comedy revue Beyond the Fringe<\/a>, which played London’s West End and then Broadway. In 1965, he and a fellow Fringe participant, Peter Cook<\/a>, moved to television, with a comedy sketch show called Not Only…But Also<\/a>, which aired on the BBC (pre-Monty Python, mind you). The show was so big that John Lennon made a guest appearance in 1966<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But despite all this success, Dudley was best known for becoming an unlikely Hollywood star with the 1979 movie 10<\/a>, which also popularized cornrows, Bo Derek<\/a> and doing it to Ravel’s Bolero.<\/p>\n