Mexican Troubadour

Didn't like the thought of such an image lingering around on the frontpage for too long. It might start giving people the wrong ideas. So instead here's something else to feast your eyes on.
I took this picture during my time in Mexico while staying in the extremely hospitable environment of Karla's mother's house in Coyoacan, Mexcio City. As is my want, on finding the house owned a guitar I had to get it out and have a strum normally to the general boredom of others as I musically twaddle. However Karla had a great little collection of Beatles songs in a songbook. On an aside, did you know that in Mexico and in indeed (I think I recall correctly) the whole of Central and South America, instead of using the system we are used to for musical notation, which denotes notes as A, B, C, D, E, F and G they use Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La and Ti? Very odd indeed. Insert general comment on the sound of music.
Anyway this caused no problems as I could make out the chords from the shapes shown. So this songbook was pretty good, containing lots of great songs in a simple style and which sounded generally correct. There are some real bad transcriptions out there sullying the good names of many an artist. So over the weeks I tooted out many of these songs. Now Karla had not as far as I could remember told me of any ability on the guitar apart from teaching as I now recall 'Hasta Siempre' by Carlos Puebla on the guitar to Alex Illiakis. Anyway the point is that it came as a suprise to me that she could play a little. She told me the story of how she had had lessons as a youngster and was quite good. However she didn't like, in fact hated even the idea of performing for people, refusing to do so at least to proper audiences. Her teacher continued to coherce her to do so without sucess. Until one day she asked Karla to just try and play for an audience and see how it went. Despite her apprehension she agreed. However unlike the Hollywood style story of talent conquering nerves she really couldn't play and the experience was obviously so great that she gave up playing. What a shame. As I twanged a few more notes I could see that when she played she obviously had some apptitude for the instrument. Her fingers had certainly not forgotten everything and at times seemed to be slap bang in the past. She continued to play while I was there and has hopefully continued to do so. It seemed like she had actually learned to play the instrument unlike us chord-whackers.
The photo captures that moment of rediscovery....hopefully!