I didn’t know who he was when we went to his museum. My family told me his name, but I didn’t understand the meaning behind it. I just remember finding his name really funny. I rolled the r dramatically and shimmied my shoulders whenever I repeated it back to them. My family found it funny too, because I was around five years old, and this guy was way, way before my time. But we made the trip to that museum anyways. My family figured they should teach me about him. He was a great performer after all.

The first building had all of his cars lined up. They were beautiful ones too. I wish I could tell you all the details, but I can’t remember much. The building was huge, or it looked huge to my little eyes. The cars were shiny. But they just weren’t my thing. Never would be.

No, the things I remember were the clothes. Big, beautiful clothes. Mannequins were lined all the way around this mirrored room, posing like rock stars and supermodels, decked out in bright shades of neon yellow, pink, green, and blazing white. Rhinestoned. Feathered. Bedazzled. Infinite inspiration for my budding obsession with fashion and shopping. These suits sparkled like strange, mythical birds, giving wings to a man whom I have never seen and never known. You’d think they’d be the only spectacle in the room. They weren’t.

In the middle sat a mirrored piano, looking like it was crafted out of crystal, an artifact of ice and starlight. It was one of those things my mother would tell me never ever to touch. Out of respect. Out of humility. Out of fear of breaking it. But this time she didn’t need to tell me. I felt the awe of it all, of the room with its rainbow of inanimate spectators. The protectors of the piano of the stars. I knew my fingers should never come close, because to be close was to touch a burning sun. Sometimes, even six-year-olds just know.

Yet one man dared to touch it. I thought it was the man himself, but no. He was apparently just a normal pianist, all dressed in white, and he played music on the crystal keys as the visitors entered the room. If you told me that pianist was synonymous with angel, I would have believed you. He made the stars in those mirrors sing. I heard them, slow and melancholy. And I, as a six-year-old with many ballet lessons and hours of watching ice skating with my mother, and absolutely no shame, began to dance. I danced around the room, spinning and twirling, lifting my arms, posing my fingers just so. The finest ballerina in this paradise of birds and diamonds. I could feel myself rotating around the piano, stuck in orbit around it, the gravity of its sound tying a silver string around my heart. It would not let me go.

The stars sang. The rainbow watched. And I danced.

I thought I was safe to do so. The music kept me safe. And no one told me to stop. No one had come into the room in a long time, and I didn’t realize until later that it was because I had the floor. Other visitors whispered, my mother said to me afterwards, about the girl dancing by the clothes. I wonder why they liked me. I twirled around the entire room, leaving practically no space for other onlookers to enjoy the feathers and rhinestones. Those famously outrageous clothes. And no one stopped me. Didn’t they want to see too? Why didn’t they stop me?

I would have stopped if they asked me to. I wasn’t there to hog the rainbow, even though deep in my heart I wanted to. Wanted to don an orange feather boa and wear a skirt full of diamonds. But I was a good kid. I didn’t know people were watching. I didn’t know he was watching. The pianist.

He stopped playing for a moment. That was the only way I could stop myself, if no one else would. He asked for my name, and I gave it to him. He smiled and asked if I would like to sit beside him. My eyes went wide. I had somehow pleased the angel. Gotten his blessing to sit with him among the stars. I couldn’t hear my mother’s gasp, nor did I look to her for permission as I stepped up onto the platform. And as I sat there and listened to him play some more, I felt myself transforming into an angel too, or a bird. A flamingo. A pink dancer with wings big enough to fly, legs long enough to dance.

Liberace. I never wanted to forget how to say it. Not when I shared a moment with his phantom on the piano. I repeated the name. Liberace. Liberace. Liberace. One for my heart, my mind, my mouth.

The angel, who happened to play the piano, got me in touch with the legend himself. Shared some of his music’s magic with me that day.

I don’t remember feeling sad to leave. I think I knew I was taking something back with me. That special power that comes with sitting atop a piano made of stars. Confidence.

It flows through my fingertips now, splaying words on a page, but it still travels to my feet once in a while. And in the deepest moments of joy and sorrow, I reach out to the mirrored piano again, that silver string tight around my heart.

And I dance.

– Luree Scott