When most people think of Mount Everest they think of Sir Edmund Hillary, whom the history books say got there first, sometimes conveniently omitting the name of the one guy who made Hillary's feat possible: Tenzing Norgay. While the Hillary name is emblazoned on mountaineering/ camping equipment, to a lot of folks the name Norgay has gotten lost between the raindrops but the truth is that if it weren't for "*Sherpa Tenzing,*":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenzing_Norgay then Hillary would've no doubt become another Kiwi-flavored popcicle as it was the Nepalese mountain-man who pointed the way to the Himalayan summit......In the film Intolerable Cruelty, the main character Miles Massey (George Clooney), a lawyer, needed to get the dirt on his client's soon to be ex-wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and in order to do so, he instructed his assistant to go into his opponent's past and find out who her Tenzing Norgay was; the person who helped introduce her to her rich husband, his client, who's ass she was going to nail in divorce court...The rationale behind that last bit serves as a metaphor for the way we all get turned on to music, and its thrust makes me think of how, early in life, I got pointed away from the pedestrian stuff pumping out of the radio in the days of disco and shown a different path by my uncles (and a few others after)...for the latter I'm eternally grateful because music, in all of its many forms, is the gift that keeps on giving, it adds verve and flourish to what would surely be, in its absence, an ontologically-bankrupt existence-- I consider them all my sherpas-of-sound, "Tenzings-of-tunes" , if you would, and I try to keep that ball rolling whenever I can, in turn, by doing the same with my friends and loved ones; it really is a gift that grows with time......Hillary and the Sherpa mountaineer were the first climbers to reach the 8,848 m (29,028 ft) summit of Mount Everest, the highest mountain in the world, on 29 May 1953 at 11:30 a.m. local time...which brings me to my question: if you look back in the rearview of your life, can you recall who's helped refine your musical proclivities and mould your sonic palate into what it is at this point? Who's your Norgay and, of equal importance, did you thank them?
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