Live entertainment is hard to come by these days, what with the pandemic shutting down all major cultural institutions for the past four months. So we should all take anything we can get, whether it's Dan Smith singing a medley of "Born This Way" and "Sympathy For The Devil" outside a bar in Hell's Kitchen or the Piano Man himself, Billy Joel, taking a break from riding his motorcycle to tickle the ivories on a discarded piano on the sidewalk.
The 71-year-old Joel was reportedly on a motorcycle ride when he spotted the discarded piano on the curb in Huntington, Long Island last month. After playing a bit of Shelton Brooks' "Darktown Strutters' Ball," a ragtime song from 1917, Joel—wearing a motorcycle get-up but NO face covering—starts talking to the person filming about the state of the piano. (Note: it seems clear the person filming was trying to do so without bringing much attention to it, hence the god awful camerawork.)
"The action is good," Joel said. "It just needs tuning, and the finish is beat. It's a perfectly good piano. It's a shame to throw it out." You can watch the full video, which was uploaded to YouTube on June 26th, below.
Joel's reps confirmed to People Magazine that the man in the video, who both looks and sounds exactly like Joel, is in fact Joel. They did not comment on whether anyone approached and put some bread in his jar and said, "Man, what are you doin' here?"
In May, Joel performed “Miami 2017 (Seen the Lights Go Out on Broadway)" as part of the Rise Up New York! COVID-19 benefit telethon to raise money for the Robin Hood Foundation, which has been fighting poverty in NYC for over 30 years. His performance was broadcast on big screens all across the city and synced up to a light show at the Empire State Building, which you can see below. He was, of course, introduced by his longtime friend Governor Andrew Cuomo, who just launched a nationwide "Mask Up" campaign and may want to relay that message to his pal.
