Arts, entertainment, culture and lifestyle facts and/or opinions. Editorial work variously performed by Jeffrey Lee Puckett, Stephen George, Mat Herron, Gabe Soria, Thomas Nord, David Daley, Lisa Hornung, Sarah Kelley, Sara Havens, Jason Allen, Julie Wilson, Kim Butterweck and/or Rachel Khong.
Friday, December 04, 2015
Angela Fitzpatrick: Pianist
The music is always around you, even in the bathroom.
Von Maur at Oxmoor Center employs four pianists, who perform in three-hour shifts on a Yamaha standing on a large rug near the front escalators. Ninety-year-old Angela Fitzpatrick was the first the store hired 13 years ago, and she still works five days a week. On this November afternoon, the 4-foot-11-inch Fitzpatrick (“More like four-six these days,” she says, laughing) wears a black jacket over a red sweater and a plaid skirt that spills over the piano bench. The dress code: Women wear dresses or blouses and skirts (no pantsuits or slacks); men wear ties. No hats. No singing. No accepting tips. Fitzpatrick is a subtle rainbow, her eyes somewhere between blue and green, her long hair a blondish color. She always cleans the piano before sitting. “I insist on it,” she says. "It’s not because of the associates that I play with, it’s the people that play when we’re not here!”
The Connecticut native has been playing piano for 85 years. “My mother was a very fine pianist,” she says. “She would have been a classical pianist if she hadn’t married my father.” Fitzpatrick graduated from Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York, in the 1940s and became a wife, mother and music educator. Beginning in 1976, she spent 15 years as a classical-radio DJ and station manager in upstate New York. Upon moving to Louisville to be close to her son, she landed a job at classical WUOL, where she stayed for a decade.
The pianists choose what to perform, a freedom that has kept Fitzpatrick, Ruth Gilbert (12 years) and Marla Kay Kosnik (10 years) around. Speakers throughout the store play their various styles: Fitzpatrick is fond of lush movie music from Henry Mancini and Michel Legrand. Gilbert likes show tunes. Kosnik prefers baby-boomer pop. Chuck Mink — the lone man — is jazzier and doesn’t like sheet music. Fitzpatrick also plays themes, such as a 40-minute set of weather-related songs that she calls “The Weather Report,” from Gershwin’s “A Foggy Day” to Harold Arlen’s “Come Rain or Come Shine.” “What I enjoy most about this job,” Fitzpatrick says, “is being able to bring music to more people.”
c. 2015 Louisville Magazine.
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