Stealth Wealth In Our Troubled Times

I seriously hope, there are a few of you here, with some fading hope about the chance to make a few bucks out of thin air. Right? Anyone left??

Now just don't expect me to blurt anything out openly on the site, you'll have to email me privately if you 'work it all out.'

I have a little list of readers here who have some interest, but if it ever occurs to you to update from time to time don't wait to be asked many many times; just go ahead and ask. You never know. You never just know when it is exactly the right time Morgiana...

'Out of thin air,' means for no money, in case you were wondering, but as with all of these kinds of things, it is just like the fairy tale says: 'in exchange for your soul,' of course, as if you didn't know.

Stealth wealth symbolism!

Now. To get on with our previous train of discussion - Arlecchina falls to Earth, if you recall, from some place in the Heavens she has been kicked out of for being a 'mocker' of the gods. And she has no money, no ID, no friends. Not even any decent clothes in fact, because they don't wear an awful lot 'up there,' in any case.

So she gets this seamstress position with a wealthy nun in an apartment in Venice (oh, didn't you know? Nuns were wealthy, and lived in private apartments, and wore extremely expensive and glamorous attire, due to the Venetian sumptuary laws). And, using the discarded off-cuts from her mistress's dresses, Arlecchina fashions the famous and now-legendary Harlequin costume.

Next she diverts an orchestra (save for but single one cellist, whom she takes along with her) from the establishment where they had been booked for the evening's affair at the house of some aristocrat, and arrived at the entrance, claiming to be the orchestra leader, and possessing a magical invisible group of players in her velveteen bag.

Just a little, we only want just a little...

She says she simply requires a closed adjoining room to the main function area, the door to which must be locked by her on the inside, and she picks out the wine servery vestibule - which does have a locking door to it - and also has numerous wine glasses arrayed there and jugs of clean, cold water.

So the master of wine (the steward...), let's her in there, and he stays in there with her, along with his serving assistant, as she locks the door, and takes out her sewing contraption from the velveteen bag, which sewing machine has a little foot-pedal fly-wheel arrangement. And she gives instructions to the steward as to how to operate the pedal to get the fly-wheel to spin around in relatively regular, if not precisely constant motion.

She arranges some glasses out on a table and fills these with varying levels of water, and also takes glasses of differing size, and puts them together in a length-wise arrangement, getting the assistant to press his oil-lubricated thumb at the end glass's stem base, holding the whole thing up against the fly-wheel the final glass mouth being held firmly with gum Arabic. And hands a quickly scribbled out piece of music to the sole cello player.

So every great classical composer of the centuries afterwards knows this story and they even know the basic tune she played, because, as they would have done, the noblemen and women in the salon, possessed a great deal of musical knowledge and the whole incident became somewhat of a cause celebre among the members of that particular little segment of Venetian society of the time in question.

However, the long and short of it is, that Arlecchina became quite wealthy, and lived a long time at the apartments of the particular 'wealthy nun' who had befriended her, and when the nun proceeded to a relatively advanced age, she died.

Surely Allah Most Merciful has given her her righteous reward in the Gardens of Paradise.

And Here Endeth the Lesson for this Evening.