PIANO PLAYER POUNDS PORTLAND

Mona Golabek via nytimes.com

The Lure Of The Piano Player.

My Amazing Mother in Law, or AMIL, will be 90 and she’s active by anyone’s standards, not just for 90.

But even she has an off day. One of her off days came the same time as her and my wife’s stage night out at Portland’s Gerding Theater.

Would I like to go instead? Only if she didn’t have a girlfriend to go with.

So we got dressed for the Gerding and headed out, only to look at the clock and see we’d be late if we didn’t move along.

We caught the green lights up 99W through Tigard. I-5 North was clear and fast.

Instead of taking another exit off the 405 I took Beaverton and 12^th and caught the lights all the way to Burnside.

We crossed to a right on Davis, a right on 11^th and Elaine jumped out to get the tickets from Will Call.

The doors closed at 7:30 and stayed closed. I parked the car and hustled back in time to find a bathroom.

But there was a line and I didn’t want to get closed out.

We found our seats around 7^th row center, what seemed like the best seats in the house.

The bare stage had a piano and four huge golden frames hanging on the rear wall.

A lady came out and told her mother’s history while playing the classical music they shared.

During each stage of the story the gold frames filled with photos and video from the era.

How good was the show? So good I forgot the line for the bathroom. That good.

Her mother’s story was of a Jewish girl in Austria during the thirties and forties about the age of Anne Frank.

From pcs.org:

Set in Vienna in 1938 and in London during the Blitzkrieg, The Pianist of Willesden Lane tells the true and inspirational story of Lisa Jura, a young Jewish musician whose dreams are interrupted by the Nazi regime. In this poignant show, Grammy-nominated pianist Mona Golabek performs some of the world’s most stunning music as she shares her mother’s riveting true story of survival. Pianist is infused with hope and invokes the life-affirming power of music.

Most stories about Nazis, Holocaust, and WWII have a clench factor built in, but this story even more.

Mona Golabek filled the stage. Nothing left out. The piano player showed why it’s called a percussion, not stringed, instrument.

She pounded it like it was supposed to be played.