Off Topic: Manualism

Recently I learned about the entertaining subculture of manualism. It happened by complete chance, I swear! You believe me, don't you?

While searching YouTube for "Cantina Band", there was a video that I couldn't resist watching. Without skipping a beat I moved my mouse over the video and clicked play. As I began watching the video of a manualist playing the Star Wars “Cantina Band” song with his hands, distant memories from my past started to emerge. It had nothing to do with rice and beans. Please!

As I was saying, we were just about to take a stroll down memory lane...

[dream sequence]
I remembered my sophomore year in high school; I was sitting in my desk during Spanish class. I should have been conjugating verbs, but instead I was attempting to squeeze air through my hands while pressing them together, firmly. Minutes passed and I kept trying to make sound with my hands. Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, there was a hush in class, and it was during that silence that my hands made “the sound”. If I recall correctly, the moment my hands made the sound of bodily relief, my face grew bright red. I had no idea if my classmates thought I had uncontrolled flatulence or if my hands made the sound.
[/dream sequence]

Fast forward twenty years, and there I was watching a guy play “The Cantina Band” using his hands! I wondered how much the musician must have practiced to be able to play the song as well as he did? Interestingly, according to Wikipedia, “Some manualists practice for as much as 30 years before finally reaching a presentable level of proficiency.” Apparently the first individual that was documented to have made musical parody with his hands was Cecil Dill. He claims to have learned how to play “Yankee Doodle” using his hands back in 1914.

Now, isn't that a gas!

Video of manualist playing "The Cantina Band" [link]
Video of Cecil Dill and his Musical Hands [link]
Wikipedia article on Manualism [link]

UPDATE [6/13/2008]: My piece aired this afternoon. If you missed it, you can download the two minute segment here [link to mp3]