
I was asked by a friend to watch his music shop for a few hours while he ran some errands. He said it wouldn’t be busy and that few customers came in at that time of day. After about an hour and not one customer coming into the shop, I decided to go for a walk and pick up a pizza. When I returned, there were three slovenly guys waiting outside, so I opened the door and reluctantly let them in. I sat down at a desk behind the counter and started eating my pizza while the guys each picked up a guitar and sat down next to some amplifiers; I went over and plugged the amps in and switched them on. Suddenly, there were five or six other people who had come into the shop and they began setting up instruments. A scruffy guy who was morbidly obese and has long greasy hair walked behind a rack of keyboards and switched them on; I couldn’t imagine this guy could really play considering his physical state. In fact, by the looks of the other guys who had come in, they didn’t look like musicians at all and I thought to myself they appeared as if they could barely play “Smoke on the Water!” Suddenly, one by one, musicians kept coming into the shop and there was a flurry of activity; people setting up instruments and two young woman—back-up up singers, I presumed—set up microphone stands and were quite cheerful and enthusiastic as they were greeted by the other musicians. Two or three technicians began taking their seats at a large mixing console and all at once this makeshift band of deplorable looking people—which was now comprised of some 40 or more musicians—began playing this amazing, mellow rock opera-type song as I stood there absolutely in awe. While the band played on, I walked into the shop’s back room so I wouldn’t get in the way and noticed shelves stocked with dozens of different kinds of breakfast cereal, most of which I’d never seen before. Then I woke up.
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