Special Guest Blogger: Liberace

While most childhoods are spent staring at cartoons over bowls of sugary breakfast cereal, some kids are more focused on things like mastering a musical instrument and i was playing the piano aged three and by seven i was performing all the difficult pieces of classical music.
My aim was always to play classical music with the boring bits left out which was surprisingly easy to do, most hour long symphonies you can cut down to 5 minutes of the decent bits and to be fair and the good bits is all anyone knows. Mention the 1812 Overture and all anyone remembers is the last bit with the canons so why subject them to the other 55 minutes when all they want is that final bit.
I began using my real name, Wladziu Valentino Liberace but as the intern said to the President, that's quite a mouthful so i changed it to Walter Busterkeys and began out playing jazz piano in bars and nightclubs which never went down with my parents until they saw how much money i was pulling in.
My secret was to not only play the piano in such a extravagant way but to dress in such a way that nobody ever forgot seeing me. I changed my name to Liberace and introduced some trademarks such as a candelabra and the regular tuxes and tails soon swapped places with costumes like a Faberge egg, a 150-pound mink cape, and one particularly flashy one was a flame costume with mirrors studded all over the cape on metallic fabric and featuring 600 electric lights.
One was so blingy it almost killed me, i had spent all day in a room polishing the thousands of little mirrors on it with a cleaning chemical and the fumes caused me to black out and the doctors only gave a 20% survival chance. Ventilation, very underrated.  
1950's America was a great place unless you were black or gay and as i ticked one of those boxes, i denied it despite mincing more than a butcher, and even successfully sued a few newspapers who tried to out me as a homosexual.
Obviously i was but nobody could say for certain but when i tested positive for AIDS, i kept it a secret and didn’t seek any treatment for it which turned out to be as effective as it sounds as i died 18 months later.