Soul Mates - Continued

The PianoLady e-mailed me this morning to ask if she was my musical soul mate.

My earliest memory of Cheryl was at Florida Technological University where we were both piano majors. You might ask why someone would go to a university named "Technological" to major in music. Well, the teacher-student ratio was almost 1:1, so it had its benefits. I believe the first semester I was there, which was the second semester the school was open, there were four music majors. (BTW, Florida Technological University is now University of Central Florida, and they have many more music majors now than in 1968.)

Our piano professor was Dr. Leonidas Sarakatsannis, whom we both adored. He smoked, and we have fond memories of him sitting, playing the piano, with his cigarette dangling from his mouth. (It was a different world then, people.) He always kept a can of Sour Balls on the piano, and we'd always take one as we left to go to our next class.

But my strongest memory is of the first time Cheryl and I sat down at two side-by-side pianos. We began playing "If Ever I Would Leave You" from Camelot (her favorite movie). The arrangements we played, even though there was no music in front of us, were almost note-for-note identical, down to the tag we put on the ending. When we played the last note, we looked at each other and laughed out loud. A piano partnership had been formed.

We played a piano duet, either four-hand or two-piano, for probably every school concert from that point until I quit school and got married. I think if we hadn't been raised in the South with the expectation that we needed to get married and have kids, we'd probably be famous today with multiple recordings to our credit. We referred to ourselves as Ferrante & Teicher or Liver & Race (Liberace, get it?). We were good.

Yes, Honey, you are my musical soul mate. (spoken in my best Southern drawl)