That is Priceless by Steve Melcher for August 16, 2023

Ella realized playing the lute was better way to make money that what Julia had to do.

/// The Lute Player depicts our five senses

(although some are portrayed as offenses).

SEE the colorful maid;

HEAR the music she played;

TASTE wine; SMELL smoke his clay pipe dispenses.

/// But the way that Steen illustrates TOUCH

may, for some, be a little too much.

A letch fondles the breast

of a bimbo, half dressed,

clearly hoping that he’ll get in Dutch.

It’s a good thing that music lifts you up.

Because as soon as that woman stops playing her lute, she’s going to plunge to her death

The roaming hands were bad enough but Greta lost it when Karl kept saying “honk honk’”

HAH! I’ve seen that before! I’m A man of the world I’ve been to Soho, Hamburg, kyabakura. I’ve been cured of diseases in five different languages, but you are a charmer and I’m between gigs. How ’bout a tour of the kitchen?

Reveler #1: “June is bustin’ out all over !”

Reveler # 2: “Yeah – she’s always been a handful,,”

“I mean it; if you play “Free Bird” one more time, I’ll jump!"

“What happens in Amsterdam, stays in Amsterdam!”

“Check it out! I’ve sounded out the theme music from ‘Basic Instinct.’”

My first concert was ELP at Olympia Stadium Detroit 1978I thought my ears would never recover from Keith Emerson’s keyboard playing or Carl Palmer’s drum solo

It’s still Palmer. Palmer Rightbreast.

The wine drinker views from the front / The lute-player’s musical stunt / How high are the skirts / That she’s using to flirt? / Is the drunk mayhap seeing her…nethers?

Mr. Steen, please paint me in with another frisky couple and have me doing something crazy with a lute, you get the idea, nudge nudge wink wink.

“I can see clearly now.”

Wine, Women, and Song ( and maybe a little toke of the smoke )! What more can a man ask for? No wonder Jan Steen looks so happy!

“I’m telling you, it’s this newfangled lute music that’s corrupting the morals of our youth! They’re all into sex and drugs now… and they’re not sharing!”

Sorry Lilly, I am not into this foursome thing…..

“And then she says, now get this…..then she says ‘Why do you need more than one lute?’”

Fat bottomed girls, you make the rockin’ world go round

“And just imagine! With my new invention you’ll be able to serenade the King uninterrupted while walking through hallways and narrow doorways! We’re going to make millions! Now, if you’ll just sign off on your investment terms here, we can serenade ourselves to the bank and withdraw your funds for the next stage of the project.”

The Lute Player: 

Paste (including the quote marks) 

"Category:Lutenists in paintings" Wikimedia 

(syntax supported by the Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and Yandex search engines) in the browser address bar (or search for it using one of those search engines) and choose the first Category: found and once there find the text string Steen, and click its link for info and links that point to more info about this roughly jumbo envelope size painting.

Again, a larger strip image is shown by (Ctrl- or right-) clicking the image in Mr. Melcher’s MASTERPIECE #3171 (August 16, 2023) blog entry, accessible by the Check out the blog! box after the last comment, and using the dropdown menu (even larger, if you trim what’s after .png from the URL). I have added a comment there pointing to the blog entry with my comment pointing to info about this artist I used to point to here. So far, 9 works by him have been used here, the August 14, 2023, strip being the prior.

P.S. The GoComics Moderator has informed me that URLs of any kind are no longer allowed in comments (why the usual site= portion has disappeared from my comment). That wasn’t his/her decision. The Comment Policy (pointed to under the strip) will be revised accordingly. When hyperlinks became disallowed in comments, sometime in 2017 I think, that was enforced retroactively, making thousands of my comments useless (not they were of great use to the general public in the first place). So far, that hasn’t happened with URLs (they still appear in old comments).

Emerson, Lake and Palmer had some good stuff (good music).

“Ignore their loud banter my dear,” he said while he cupped her bosom and pulled her closer, “everyone’s attention is on them and no-one can see what we are doing. Now give us a little snuggle and then I can show you some etches I have at my place.”

Though he was successful at producing a coin from her bosom, the magician, David Cop-A-Feel, was never well received.

Is that the same letch from Monday? (The functioning alcoholic hitting on yet another woman.)

entertaining him with song keeps him from coming on to me, that and all these clothes.

Emerson, Lake and Biden?

By the time she has finished with all 40 tuning pegs on that lute, Mr. Steen will have passed out entirely, and the lass in the background will have become pregnant… twice.

It isn’t ELP. Years later they finally made a hit called “Dancing Queen”.

“Meet on the ledge, we’re gonna meet on the ledge…”