One of the local highlights of the Woodstock Film Festival this year is the world premiere of Gillian Farrell’s 9 Pianos, which got its start when she and fellow Woodstock filmmaker Burrill Crohn read a story in these pages about Adam’s Piano owner Adam Markowitz’s 2005 plans to take a truckload of used upright pianos down to musicians, schools and just plain folk in post-Katrina New Orleans.
Markowitz has kept giving pianos since that 2006 start, not only to people in New Orleans, but also around his own home region of many years, which just makes more bittersweet the current situation in which Markowitz finds himself — post-Irene, when flood waters deposited four feet of mud into his home and ground floor studio outside of New Paltz, ruining his own piano.
“Talk about irony,” noted Farrell in the past week. “Maybe this festival screening, which he’ll be attending, will help things turn around…it would be nice for someone who can to step up and help him let this circle be unbroken!”++
For more on the film’s screening, see the accompanying article. For more on Markowitz, visit his storeroom at 592 Route 299 between New Paltz and Highland, visit www.adamspiano.com, call 845-978-2235, or e-mail amarkowitz@hvc.rr.com.
Join the family! 
