17 06 Emmanuel Life

4
who do people say i am?
A Washington Post journalist by the name of Gene Weingarten won the
Pulitzer Prize in 2008 for an article he wrote entitled “Pearls Before Breakfast.”
It was about a busker playing a violin at the top of the escalator outside the
L’Enfant Station Plaza in Washington, D.C. Hidden from view was a video
camera set up to record the event, and the busker played some of the most
inspiring classical music ever written. And the commuters just walked on by,
and by and large, ignored him.
The violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the most famous violinists in the world.
And the violin he was playing was a Stradivarius, which was made in 1713
by Antonio Stradivari, and had been purchased for a
reported 3.5 million dollars.
Now Joshua Bell normally plays in the
great concert halls of Moscow, St.
Petersburg, Vienna, Prague,
London, Paris, New York, and
in November will be in Toronto
(Tickets range from $160-260
each). People pay a lot of
money to go to hear him
play. He earns up to a
thousand dollars a minute
for his actual playing.
On this particular
morning he walked
into the exit of the train
Station, positioned
himself against a
wall next to a trash
basket. He was wearing
jeans, a long-sleeved
t-shirt, and a baseball
cap. He removed his violin
from its case and placed
the case open on the ground
in front of him, threw in some
change to encourage donations,
and began to play. Every time a
train pulled into the station, people
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