Performing for a cause
WAYNESBURG – When pianist Nelson Fox of Waynesburg got involved with the American Cancer Society, something musical was bound to happen.
On Saturday, Fox and other committee members from the ACS Greene County unit are hosting a variety show at Waynesburg University’s Goodwin Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for children and students. Fox is hoping to fill the house for the fight for the cure.
“I wanted to do a fundraiser, first and foremost, to bring awareness to the deadly disease of cancer. I’m a cancer survivor myself. But I also wanted to bring the community together to have a fun evening,” Fox said. “We have 14 acts and the show starts with Sting Swing and 12 dancers from the Waynesburg University Dance Club. Faith Musko, who teaches chemistry at the university, will do a separate performance with Frank Blakemore as F Squared and Edward L. Powers is our master of ceremonies. The university has been very supportive. Students who volunteer to help with the show get in for free. We want to spread the word.”
Finding talent for the show was a song for Fox, who spent decades giving piano lessons, playing his keyboard in church and at community events, organizing variety shows, doing music programming at Waynesburg University, playing sets with GNP, the annual spring get-together of musicians who pilgrimage to campus for a one-night-only show, and, lately, getting his own band together to play at events like Rain Day.
“I just started calling people I knew and the word got out,” Fox said. “Randy and Daria Jones I know from GNP, and Ashley Mason from the Lamplighters. A lot of these people were part of the variety shows we did to fundraise for Catholic Charities. Our last show was 2008 and I remember Amanda Frampton performing on a tiny quarter size violin. She will be playing her violin on Saturday, and I’ll accompany her on piano.”
The variety show will have everything from country swing to violin solos, piano duos, gospel songs, acoustic sets, show tunes and cover songs done by veteran singers and emerging young voices.
“My vocal coach, Lucien Schroyer, told me about this,” said Coco Pahanish, 19, of Jefferson, as she struck an album cover pose in front of the university’s performing arts center with Fox and pianist Aidan Kern, a fifth-grade student at Jefferson-Morgan Elementary School.
Pahanish, like her father, Dave, a professional musician living and working in Nashville, Tenn., has a passion for music and a band of her own, the Coleman Lee Band. But Saturday, she will be a solo singer, with Schroyer accompanying her on guitar. “I’ll sing ‘Break Away’ by Kelly Clarkson and ‘My Immortal’ by Evan Escense.”
“Aidan’s my student – he’s been taking lessons for four years and he’ll be playing the baby grand piano here on Saturday,” Fox said.
“I’m excited,” Kern admitted, grinning as the afternoon sun turned his glasses into a cool shade of gray, just in time for the photo-op.
Kern will perform “My Favorite Things” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” and Fox is playing a piano duo with his grandmother, Kathy Kern. Fox said, “We’re doing ‘I Love a Piano.'”
Ferd Dolfi will accompany The Richard Lee Waddel Quartet, Jessica Litniskas is coming in from Uniontown to sing “One Moment in Time” and patrolman Tom Ankrom will close the show with a tribute to Elvis Presley, Fox said. “Every performance will be at least 10 minutes long and hopefully we’ll have time for every act to do another song if that’s what the audience wants.”