She is not Lang Lang, Clara Schumann, Billy Joel or Carole King, but she can play.
Painted pianos appeared in our suburban, crow-casing, gull-splattered village, and one by the oceanside demands a visit whenever she paddles that way.
On her board she is a tall, bronze, sinewy and slender moving wave – totem but over silent keys she crouches like a hunter searching for her finger-memory.
No shanties, no seaweed songs – she is now part of a stable earth-element and moves from Chopin to Joplin to Elton John and back with flying hair-flair.
They gather – a cluster surprised by the instrument and the pianist’s intensity but feeling the music against the wind-stirred backdrop of an alfresco concert.
Far from a Bechstein, yellow with blue flowers, its psychedelic artwork glows and cries out so loudly for Lucy in the sky with her diamonds that she has to oblige.
Mission accomplished, she encores with a rip-roaring Rachmaninoff before picking up the paddle, she slips off her sandals
and slides way on her board.
She was not Lang Lang, Clara Schumann, Billy Joel or Carole King, but she could play …
Frank Wilson
Oak Bay
