I Was Able to Play on Liberache's Piano Yesterday!

Jewel encrusted cars, including a Rolls Royce; this diamond and sapphire watch (above), his piano shaped swimming pool with black and white keys (below); and a grand piano completely covered with rhinestones holding a gold candelabra; the most-bling-iest outfits ever; and, of course, his talented, over-the-top, schmaltzy playing in Vegas or on the Ed Sullivan Show.

Now they're making a movie about him... LIBERACHE.  It's with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon.

Because of the movie, there is a display of his outfits and memorabilia at Time-Warner, here in Manhattan.  I stumbled upon it doing some shopping yesterday and I got to play his rhinestoned piano a bit.  I had a big smile afterwards.

Among other great pianos, I played on Horowitz's and Billy Joel's, (when I appraised his apartment). Now I can add this to my resume, my collection, the stories I tell.

Well, it's only fair since so many famous people played on my piano, (when it was in the NBC studio).

Now, it's funny, the things or experiences we collect to make us feel special.  We are all but little Liberaches, though we may tell ourselves we have "better," less gaudy taste.  We tell ourselves this is what sets us above Liberache, and chuckle at him.

An interesting aside is the difference between the way men and women collect.  I remember reading the study by a CD company. (Yes, there actually was a time when people bought lots of CDs.)

The company discovered that male collectors would have to own every last CD of whatever they were collecting.  And they would hunt down the last, unfound disks with the purpose of Teddy Roosevelt or Ernest Hemingway going after big, African game.

Women, on the other hand, the company found out, were satisfied to buy this and that music CD, collect a bit or most of an artist and move on.  Gatherers not hunters, they.

I haven't played on enough "famous" pianos yet to feel I've got to fill out "my collection."  I haven't got the bug.  But I'd like to sit in Glenn Gould's odd chair and play a partita on his Chickering, and I'd be thrilled to play on Rachmaninoff's grand, and to play Bartok's sonatina on Bartok's piano, among my other little ambitions.  And I'm sad that they disassembled the organ that Bach played on.  That would have been the jewel in the crown of my collection - to play on the organ Bach himself played his Toccata and Fugue.  (Here I sigh, in a very Charlie Brown sort of way.)

Click Here - to hear Toccata and Fugue in D minor, with very neat graphics.  (Almost 20 million hits for this classical music piece on YouTube; it's that good.)

Even Better Than Getting on a Popular TV Show

I got my fifteen minutes of fame over these past two weeks.  (Hey! I referenced Warhol in the last post too.)  Well, I had to share the minutes with lots of others on the TV show, Royal Pains - where I was sort of conscripted into being an extra in two scenes.

Our first scene, in a hospital, was shot not in the Hamptons, (false Gasp! added here), but in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, just about the furthest point from the Hamptons while still standing on Long Island.  

But the cool thing was not being on TV; it happened when I took to wandering off when we had some down time and saw something I never thought I would. 

It was the edge of evening, and as I walked a block over to an unobstructed view of Manhattan, the Empire State Building jumped out, majestically, subtly lit.  Now that building is my Mt. Fuji of the famous 100 views of Mt. Fuji - over the years I have been running across new viewing angles and lightings.  It seems to me like 100 different skyscrapers, not one.

The thing about it is, I still have one watercolor from when I grew up on the North Fork (the quieter fork above the Hamptons).   It's a watercolor of the city which I had then visited only once.  Featured in it is the Empire State building.  But the scene always bothered me these many years.  I painted it with short buildings and a gas station in the foreground.  A view that had the re-juxtapositioning of a dream - a small town contiguous with the city.  Not real. 

Now, many years later, I was staring at my watercolor come to life. I painted it in third grade; and as an adult, it was a rare itch in the back of my mind.  Now I can let it rest.