Update on Cherry the mandolinâŒïž
So yesterday I had a while free and some shopping to do so I brought Cherry into town with me to take her into the quirky local music shops and ask for advice for fixing her. I left my apartment at about quarter to five in the afternoon, crossed the river, and hit the inventively named Shop Street. The first shop I took her to, which was the only music shop I was aware of in my city, is the jam-packed host to a panoply of weird lutes and kalimbas, fiddles and steel pans, keyboards and saxophones and also canes. We love.
Unfortunately, however, at the counter I was told that their technician isn't gonna be in until Monday (shock horror), and the guy there didn't know enough about This Sort of Thing to help me. He did, however, suggest I go to "Moloney's", a shop unknown to me up to this point. So I hit up the google maps to search for Moloney's. It took me down a side street and to a tiny doorway in the side of a tattoo parlour about five and a half feet high.
Having squeezed in, a series of handmade signs pointed me further and further up a series of narrow staircases, until I finally reached a door with a sign on it saying "We are Open! Please remove all rucksacks (large backpacks)" and another underneath saying "Maximum occupancy: 3". So I wasn't quite sure what I was getting into at this point.
It was a bigger room than expected given the maximum occupancy, but still not a big room. In the centre there's a glass display case holding saxophones and oboes, and an assortment of flutes and tin whistles on a shelf in the top. The walls are absolutely covered in different lutes - mostly acoustic guitars, but one end of the room has been entirely dedicated to mandolins, save for one hook which is bending under the weight of twenty-odd hand-woven mandolin straps.
"Oh ho ho," I think to myself. "Thees is-a the shop for-a me."
The only guy working there was currently speaking to another customer about something to do with guitars, so I took a couple minutes looking around at their wares. As I say, it was mostly acoustic guitars by a wide margin but they had violins, violas, one double bass by the counter, banjos, a harp, electric guitars and electric basses, and some remnant decorations from both Christmas and Halloween atop the display case.
In due time, the other customer left so I went up to the counter to ask the guy working there if he was the luthier (a delightful word which the employee in the first store told me to ask for) and if he could help me with my fucked up rescue mandolin. At this point however, it was half past five, and this shop was only open until six, so he gave me some basic suggestions (loosen the strings, get some glue into the cracks) but that it would take probably twenty minutes to get into everything I should do and he had things to do before he closed up shop. I figured that was fair enough, and left him alone to finish up his day.
Unfortunately, that's where I had to leave my search for help for the day, as it was getting time for shops to be closing up and I didn't know of anywhere else I could go. So Cherry and I went to the supermarket and then headed home, not entirely emptyhanded, but having gleaned less from the day's outing than might have been ideal.
I've loosened Cherry's strings, and on my next outing shall look for an appropriate glue for her crack (gosh I'm good), but that's all the news I bear. I'll be back in town to revisit the first shop tomorrow, which may give me more to blog about, but that will be it for today.
...except for this photo of me in a skeleton mask I found lying on the ground a couple months ago. Have a skeleton day â ïžâ ïžâ ïž
