The late great cartoonist Mell Lazarus had a white piano in his living room…or at least it was white when he got it. At some point, cartoonists began drawing on it and since darn near every great cartoonist of a decade or two visited Mell, the piano came to be the ultimate sketchbook.
I consider myself partly responsible for its greatness. On one visit there, Mell pointed to a cup of markers and asked me to add a drawing to the array. I don't draw much and even if I was in practice, I wouldn't output anything worthy of being seen alongside those other piano-defacers' contributions. So I told Mell I'd do it before I left…and didn't do it. It would be a much less impressive artifact if it had one of my scrawls on it. See how impressive it is without me…