In The Wilderness ~Vic~

~vic~

Vic was really the only musician of the group. He was the Elton John loving piano-playing prodigy that he still is today. Vic and I go so far back as to be fellow flag bearers as children in the Episcopal Church; the church all adults desiring of upper-social mobility joined in Orangeburg, South Carolina at the time and possibly to this day. And to this day, I envy Vic's profound ability to sit on any publicly provided piano and wow those in attendance with the full and completely orchestrated rendition of practically any popular song on the radio. The one we heard the most was 'Babe' by Styx. Vic would play the signature piano line verbatim, but he would also play the lead vocal line, the bass line and any other part you may have remembered about the song, or rather any song he happened to wow you with.

Vic was a prodigy for as long as I can remember. He told me he learned to first play piano by ear when he discovered he could play a snippet of a Jackson 5 '45, then figure out the part on the home piano and then go on to the next part until he had the entire song down. When his parents took him to his first piano lesson and the teacher asked him to play what he knew, he was so embarrassed and not wanting to 'show up' the teacher; that while he could have played the complete version of 'Crocodile Rock', he instead purposely did a clumsy rendition of something like 'Jesus Loves Me' or ' Happy Birthday'. This is Vic, my brother.