Minn. boy with muscular disease plays for research
Go Deeper.
Create an account or log in to save stories.
Like this?
Thanks for liking this story! We have added it to a list of your favorite stories.
By BOB SHAW, St. Paul Pioneer Press
Woodbury, Minn. (AP) - Alex Amble can play Beethoven on the piano. And he can do it standing backward. And upside down. With muscular dystrophy.
But that is easy compared with the new goal of the Woodbury 15-year-old - to use his music to raise $1 million to combat the disease.
"I am a big dreamer," said Alex, a self-assured eighth-grader at New Life Academy in Woodbury.
Turn Up Your Support
MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all.
"A million. It struck me as a round number. You know, not too high, not too low."
Really? Not too high?
His mother stepped in.
"Well, I heard about a man in California who raised $26 million for ALS," Becky Amble said with a shrug.
Large amounts of money are needed, said Alex, because of the sky-high cost of muscular dystrophy research.
"Research costs a lot - $1,000 for four minutes, or something like that," he said.
Asked his mom: "Who's to say what his goal should be?"
So far, no one has.
Alex was adopted from a Russian orphanage in a city north of Moscow. When Becky Amble and husband Marshall Gravdahl first saw him, he was 2 and had been badly neglected.
"It was bizarre. He just sat there. They had to pick up the chair and turn it so he would face us," Amble said.
Officials dumped a pile of Legos in front of him, but he wouldn't move.
"He didn't even know how to play," Amble said.
The couple fell in love on the spot and brought him back to Woodbury. At 3, Alex was playing the piano.
"He can almost pick up any instrument and play it," Amble said. At the age of 5, Alex could memorize 20 pages of sheet music.
His proficiency grew, but his brush with fame came from his ability to play the piano with his back to the keyboard. In 2002, the producers of "The Late Show with David Letterman" asked him to perform for the "Stupid Human Tricks" segment.
He passed the audition, but he never appeared because his family had to travel to Russia to adopt another child - his brother, Pasha.
"We were robbed," Amble said.
Two years ago, doctors discovered Alex had muscular dystrophy. He tends to walk on his toes and has developed a slight tremor in his left hand.
It is not expected to shorten his life, but muscular dystrophy only gets worse - never better.
"There is no medicine, no treatment, no nothing," Amble said.
Alex, however, was not one to suffer in silence.
During spring break last year, he recorded a CD that included three of his own songs. He decided to try to raise $1 million for the Muscular Dystrophy Association by selling music on the Internet.
Last year, he played piano at 25 fundraisers - and learned that show business is sometimes a grind.
His low point was a Rotary Club appearance, which netted a mere $7.
"I said, 'C'mon, guys, really,'" Alex recalled.
The year was hard on his mother, too. Alex's proceeds for the year were $6,000.
"I spent almost all my time on this for nine months. Somehow this has got to get a life of its own," Amble said.
His new strategy is to cut back on the number of personal appearances, try to encourage school-based fundraisers and jump-start album sales with the help of national media.
"I hope to get on national news shows, maybe Ellen DeGeneres, maybe Leno," Alex said.
He recently practiced on one of three pianos in his house.
He rendered a pair of lovely classical tunes. He then slipped into improvisation, playing as if hypnotized, new music pouring out of his fingertips and filling the house.
As always, he searched for a melody, a riff, a pattern - some treasure hidden in the notes. When his mother began talking nearby, he interrupted: "I've got something, Mom!" - a message for her not to spoil his concentration.
When he was done, he exhaled loudly.
"My teacher says I don't follow the rules," he said, "but I am fantastic at improvisation."
Then it was time for the stunts, such as the work-in-progress upside-down technique.
He carefully lay on the piano bench on his back, head hanging under the keyboard, then reached up to the keyboard as if it were a chin-up bar.
After a few wrong notes, the music began - haltingly.
"Sweet!" he said, groaning from somewhere under the bench. "I am doing it!"
---
Information from: St. Paul Pioneer Press
(Copyright 2011 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
