Today’s Good News: Imagine Piano Peace Project
I normally try to stay away from what people derisively call “feel-good” stories. While this blog is about good news, I try not to make the stories about just one person beating the odds or doing something adorable. However, this story about the piano on which John Lennon wrote “Imagine” turning up to comfort people in places of woe is, to me, more about the healing power of art. Besides, it’s an excuse to mention George Michael.
The Wall Street Journal had a story about the peripatetic piano and its performance art. It happens that George Michael - I’m a huge fan, and don’t care what anyone thinks of that - bought the piano back in 2000. He and his partner, Dallas gallery owner Kenny Goss, put the piano in with an exhibit of war photography at the gallery and thought it was a neat combination. They recently started sending it to some sites of America’s worst violence. (They don’t go with themselves, but send another artist named Caroline True.)
They basically just take the piano and plunk it down somewhere, in a parking lot or on a street corner, and see what happens. Yes, people can play it if they want to, and it seems many do.
When the piano visited Virginia Tech, student Lori Blanc was surprised at how she was drawn to the piano. “I am a scientist and not a sentimental person,” said Ms. Blanc. But she spent more than an hour with the piano, playing a song she had composed for a friend who was murdered a few years ago, and said it was “symbolic and healing.”
The instrument has been to more than 10 sites, including where Martin Luther King died in Memphis; New Orleans; Oklahoma City; and to Waco for a service for the Branch Davidians. The tour will end in December at the Dakota in New York, where John Lennon was killed in 1980.
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