Letter from the Director: Anything is Possible Vol. 141, March 2025

By  Renée Tillotson

Our housemaster of music, Dustin Hara, says that he mentioned to me a few months back that he wanted a grand piano for Still & Moving Center. Of course, I would have loved for us own a beautiful piano from which Dustin and others could shower us with their music. 

A professional musician friend named Peter Kater has people lie underneath the piano while he spontaneously creates music for them. He told me several years ago that if I would rent a grand piano, he would do sound healing sessions as a benefit event. His description thrilled me! Since then, I have longed for that piano experience, but rental rates for a weekend would start at about $1,500. Yikes! So when Dustin mentioned his wish for a grand piano, it simply fell out of my mind as being unrealistically expensive. 

I must not yet have received my dad’s last words of wisdom to me before he passed away last November: “Anything is possible at any time.”

Even though I forgot his wish, Dustin began actively pursuing the idea of finding us a piano. He started texting and calling fellow musicians on island, looking into newspaper ads, talking to old church friends, and searching online for pianos. 

He held out the impossible hope of finding a free grand piano. Hah!

In fact, he did find a few well-priced pianos, so he considered buying one himself and contributing it to Still & Moving. However, whenever he went to look at a piano for sale, it was the wrong color or poorly maintained. Its owners were rude or they never played it and just used their piano as a decoration. Nothing suited our need. As Dustin shares, “People’s energy goes into an instrument, so when I play it, I can feel and hear whether or not love was put into that piano.”

A few weeks back, some friends of Dustin’s alerted him to an online post of a military family looking for a worthy recipient of a baby grand piano that they wanted to give away. It evidently had quite a history of local significance.

Recognizing that this might be a big catch, he arranged to meet the family and see their baby grand. He tried to stack as many cards in our favor as he could, asking his hanai (adoptive) Uncle Mark and Aunty Doris Morisaki to come along as his loving ‘ohana (extended family). Doris thought Dustin was crazy to want such a “monstrosity” to fit into our space. “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” she had told him. Dustin has winning ways, though. They were soon bundled into his car, off to see the baby grand.

You remember the Morisakis, yes? The love birds who met on the dance floor? (Link) Besides teaching hula at Still & Moving, Doris, serves as our official Ambassador of Aloha – no kidding. It’s on her business card! And amiable Mark – when he’s not doing his duties as a doctor of gastroenterology – is our marvelous balloon magician, general handyman for whatever breaks at the studio, and also is Dustin’s musical sidekick at our performances. They’re good allies if you want to make a strong impression on new people!

Just trying to get onto Schofield Barracks to check out the instrument became an adventure in itself. Dustin and the Morisakis waited in a massive car line-up outside the gate for the better part of an hour. Dustin had bowled competitively on the Base as a teenager, so he was easily cleared to enter, but Doris and Mark had to get out of the car, be individually photographed and questioned. The guard had never heard “checking out a piano” as a reason to enter the military base, yet he eventually allowed them through the gate.

Their GPS didn’t seem to work on base, so our dauntless piano search team drove up and down many streets before finally arriving at the home of Elena and Kevin Rice and their four young children. The husband began interviewing Dustin and Mark while the wife and Doris sat down in rockers to talk story.

She said the piano was commissioned to be made for the Willows Restaurant, which Doris knew to be the number one most-fondly remembered eatery on O’ahu (1944–2019). As one nostalgic Willows patron recalls: “The whole atmosphere there was intimate and very ‘Old Hawaii’ to me.” As it turns out, our Kumu Mālia’s grandmother had been a cashier at the Willows for many years – a connection point for Still & Moving Center. I can just imagine how many love tunes were crooned over that piano, how many little girls danced a hula for their tutu in front of it, how many Hau’oli lā hānau birthday songs were sung to its accompaniment.

When the Grace Bible Church purchased The Willows in 2020, they decided against changing out their electronic keyboard for a baby grand 🥴🤷🏼‍♀️ .  Instead, they graciously 🙏🏼 gifted the piano to a military family eager to receive it: the Rices.😅

Elena Rice has all the attendant duties of being a military spouse, as well as having her four active children. Nevertheless, she wanted to keep bettering herself and set a good example for her kids. Once the family received this lovely piano from the church, Elena carved out time to practice her piano-playing skills. 

Now in 2025, her husband was being re-assigned to Wisconsin. Elena was loathe to leave the piano behind, but it would take up so much of their allowable poundage for the move that she was willing to gift it to special people… on one condition: Mr. Rice had to buy her another piano when they arrived in Wisconsin. He agreed! 

So Dustin and Mark are now talking to Kevin Rice over the piano. They could sell this instrument for quite a bit of money, but they prefer to gift it to someone else who will love it, not just flip it for a profit. Kevin wants to know who we are, why we want the piano, and what we are going to do with it. Dustin tells him about our loving community at Still & Moving, how much we love music and dancing to it, and how he is teaching vocal workshops to the students. Dustin speaks of all of the benefits we conduct for non-profits, all of the free-to-the-community events with music that we put on yearly, monthly, and weekly.

Satisfied, Kevin shows our guys the inner workings of their well-maintained piano, even showing them self-maintenance tips about how to fix sticky keys. They can see from the outside that it is made of a beautiful, golden honey-toned wood, and on the underside they find the serial number sticker that says “Willows Restaurant” and a unit number. This piano is the REAL DEAL, an authentic piece of Honolulu history! 

Our team gives it a thumbs up, shakes hands with the Rices, and makes plans for carefully transferring this substantial yet delicate instrument to Still & Moving.

Meanwhile, I know nothing of all these goings-on.

Fast forward to Valentine’s Day. I’m coming down the stairs from teaching my Nia class in our Barefoot Ballroom and find Kumu Mālia greeting me with a plate of Valentine cookies, staffer Thuan holding out a bouquet of roses, Doris filming me on her phone… 

… and the most lovely sounds coming to me from the corner of what we now call our Lyrical Lobby. What on earth is making that beautiful music? 

I look into the far corner, and there’s Dustin sitting at our very own baby grand piano pouring out peals of musical joy! As soon as I see and hear it, I crawl under its belly to get the full 360 ‘surround sound’ music experience. Amazing.

Even Doris has to concede that Dustin was absolutely right: “Although an upright takes up so much less space, I now get why people invest in a grand piano: the depth of the music is so powerful.”

Everybody else loves our new addition! People cannot pass by Dustin playing without dropping whatever they had been doing and breaking into dance! Our Yoga teacher Robin Shepard heard Dustin playing the other day and immediately sat down to listen. You know, those piano chords are awfully good at pulling on your heartstrings. Robin quickly dissolved into a puddle of tears. Good tears. More people are singing here these days. When Dustin is in seventh heaven with his hands on the keys, everybody else goes with him!

And this magical music maker – just as Dustin envisioned – came to us as a gift. 

I am starting to see that my good old dad was right: “Anything is possible at any time.”