Acoustic & Digital Piano Buyer Spring 2017: Supplement to The Piano Book
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This book is a one-stop, up-to-date information source ...)
This book is a one-stop, up-to-date information source for virtually everything you need to know about buying a piano—including the latest pricing. The latest supplement to the pianist's must-have reference The Piano Book, this comprehensive guide provides list prices for more than 3,000 currently manufactured acoustic and digital piano brands and models, as well as advice on how to estimate actual street prices to help negotiate the lowest possible price. Summarizing the essentials of The Piano Book, this new resource goes beyond the basics to offer extensive details on digital pianos and reveals all the information necessary to differentiate between a good deal and a great deal. Anyone in the market for a new or used piano—including teachers, technicians, students, and aficionados—can make a more informed purchase using this definitive guide. Updated twice a year with the most accurate information, the manual fully covers piano manufacturers, instrument models, prices, and current trends and conditions in the piano market.
Louis Feinberg, known professionally as Larry Fine, was an American actor, comedian, violinist and boxer, who is best known as a member of the comedy act The Three Stooges.
Background
He was born Louis Feinberg on Philadelphia's South Side, the son of Joseph Feinberg and Fanny Lieberman. He was the first of four children. His show business bent became clear at an early age; as a two-year-old he danced for relatives atop a jewelry display case at his parents' watch repair shop.
However, his other childhood talents gave no warning of the lowbrow slapstick comedies in which he would later achieve fame with Moe Howard and Curly Howard, two brothers with whom he founded the Three Stooges' first lineup.
Education
Fine first took up the violin as therapy to rejuvenate an arm that was injured when his father accidentally spilled a bottle of acid on it. Fine became so proficient at playing that in his teens he won several amateur contests. He later played the violin in a number of Stooges shorts and remained a jazz buff through the years. Fine was also a teenage boxer, fighting forty amateur bouts under the name "Kid Roth. " However, it was when he went into vaudeville that he came up with the alias of his fame, Larry Fine.
Career
His professional show business debut came in 1921, when he played the violin and danced with the Gus Edwards' Newsboy Sextet.
Through his active years, his family would live in hotels in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Hollywood, as his work dictated. However, the couple was "wed" professionally before they married legally, performing together with Mabel's sister Loretta as "the Haney Sisters and Fine" until 1925, when Fine was signed by Ted Healy, a vaudeville headliner with a two-man supporting cast called "the Laugh Racketeers. "
Fine, who replaced the departing Shemp Howard, was paired with the remaining Howard brother, Moe. With an assortment of third men, Fine and Moe Howard remained a team for the next forty-five years, appearing together in hundreds of Broadway shows, film shorts, live shows, and feature films. The frizzy-haired Fine earned ninety dollars per week with Healy, who worked off and on with Larry and Moe for the next nine years. During this time, they signed a deal with MGM Studios and appeared in five films with stars such as Jimmy Durante, Joan Crawford, Fred Astaire, and Clark Gable.
An appearance in the 1929 Broadway revue "A Night in Venice" prompted the New York Times to describe the trio as "three of the frowziest numbskulls ever assembled. "
A 1934 financial contract dispute led to the final split with Healy. The Three Stooges--now with Curly Howard, another of Moe's brothers--signed their own agreement with Columbia Pictures on March 6, 1934, which led to the first of 190 film shorts. Woman Haters featured a cameo appearance by Walter Brennan, then unknown.
The Stooges quickly established the roles that would carry them through the next four decades: Moe as the dictatorial leader, Curly the jovial smart aleck, and Larry the pliable jack-of-all-trades caught in the middle.
The film shorts featured the same type of comedy the Stooges perfected in their vaudeville years: outrageous physical jokes with hilarious sound effects, bad puns, and sight gags.
A typical exchange from Men in Black, in which the Stooges play aspiring doctors, had a hospital executive asking Larry, "What do you men know about medicine?" "We graduated with the highest temperatures in our class, " replied Fine.
Over the course of their many films, the Stooges, always in character, adopted a wide range of roles--icemen, football players, doctors, plumbers, and professors, to name but a few. In addition to their work in short films--which launched the careers of several prominent stars, including Lucille Ball, and Lloyd Bridges--they appeared in another Broadway show, The George White Scandals of 1939, and did brief bits in a half-dozen feature films.
However, the Stooges suffered a crushing blow with the death of Curly in 1952. Shemp Howard returned and the reconstituted trio enjoyed some of their greatest successes. The Motion Pictures Exhibitors awarded them the Laurel Award as the most successful two-reel movie makers in 1950, 1951, 1953, 1954, and 1955.
This last year proved bittersweet, as Columbia--sensing a change in the business--ended its twenty-four-year association with the group. Shemp died in the same year, and Fine began to consider retiring. Instead, they added Joe Besser and pressed on.
Fine spent his last years in the Motion Picture and Television Country Home in Woodland Hills, California. The group continued to work until Larry suffered a 1970 stroke, which left him paralyzed on the left side. In his final years, Fine made personal appearances on high school and college campuses. He suffered a second stroke in late 1975, and a fatal stroke four months later.