All that glitters Travel Video duration – 5.16 minutes. Liberace Museum Las Vegas, USA Travel Video 72 hours (Music) I am so excited to be here today... Tanya Combs Museum director, Liberace Museum Well Amy, as we enter our costume gallery, I have to tell you, you have selected a lovely necklace. And while it is just beautiful, it is just not enough to be in the spirit of Liberace here. So we need to add a little more bling, I hope that’s ok. This is the most amazing ring that I’ve ever seen in my life. I am glad that I’m fitting in now, with my bling. Yes, much better. My understanding about Liberace is that he was a child prodigy. Yes indeed. You know, he started playing piano at four years old. Played by the ear, originally, imitating what he heard his sister play. Well his parents quickly realized that this is a talent and they were able to get a well known teacher in the area, Florence Kelly to listen to him play. She agreed to teach him, but she said in no time that he had surpassed anything she could possibly teach him. He went on to have a long-running scholarship at the Wisconsin Conservatory. (Music) In the fifties, when he had his television show, he just wore a black tux like most of the musicians of the day. 1955, he opened the Riviera Hotel with what we consider to be the first costume. We have it on display, here in the museum and it is just a plain gold lame jacket. But in the 50’s, that was huge, for any musician to wear gold lame. The fans loved it. Liberace said “from then on, you know, it was history. They wanted more and I gave it to them.” He went to sequins, to fur, to feathers to rhinestones – even a costume that would light up, with a battery pack. Everything done and tried. This is the King Neptune costume and you can imagine, looking at the costume – people are always asking about the weight. So let me tell you, this costume weighs over 200 pounds. Two hundred pounds? Wow! Yeah. He only weighed about a 185, so when you look at it, you can kind of see, from all the beading and the jewels, that it would be quite heavy. He knew the fans wanted to see fantastic costumes. This is another fun costume. This particular one was worn for the hundredth anniversary of the statue of Liberty – the red white blue hot pant is a favorite with all of our guests. You know, he wanted to wow the audience, but he wanted to be dressed (in) you know, something that’d celebrate the hundredth anniversary. Each costume has a different theme to it. And, you know, I think they love the fact that Liberace, he wasn’t afraid to embarrass himself to make people laugh, to have a good time. They just love all of these costumes. This and all, how did this come to be? Always the showman, Liberace soon incorporated cars into his act. You know, everything matched. The pianos matched the car, the costumes matched the car; I mean he was the ultimate showman. It was all done in fun, it was a spectacular thing to see Liberace driven out on stage by a chauffeur, stepping out of this fabulous car, in a fabulous costume, you know what fun the entire show was. This is our piano gallery. This is a real favorite, with anyone who is musical, obviously. But you know, Liberace, when he was alive, we know that he has as many as 39 pianos. And what’s special about this gallery is that it shows the evolution of the piano. You get so caught up in this fanfare surrounding Liberace that you forget that he is actually a classically trained musician. That’s exactly right. And you know, he realized early on that only a few people out there would really like just classical music. So the first thing he did is, he combined popular music with classical. And guess what? He got in lot of people who probably would never hear classical music, to listen. Then he added a little bit of the showman to it you know... And then he said, “Look, I can put on this show that everyone is going to have fun.”