Anyone who attended last October’s Tartan Day celebration in Morristown could not have missed David Palladino, the dashing bagpiper leading the Rampant Lion Pipe Band.
Nobody would have guessed his grim secret.
Days earlier, David was diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma and ordered to the hospital. He opted instead for drugs and a transfusion, and never missed a note while marching from St. Peter’s Episcopal Church to the Macculloch Hall Historical Museum on that spectacular autumn Sunday.
Things have been touch-and-go ever since for David, a history teacher at the Morris County School of Technology. To help defray his medical expenses, fellow parishioners at St. Peter’s are throwing a “Notes of Hope” fundraiser there on April 10 at 4 pm.
Pianist Rio Clemente, the “Bishop of Jazz,” will perform with singer Elena Zabiyako. Fine drinks, hors d’oeuvres and desserts will be served. Tickets are $25 to $200.
David Palladino leads the band in this 2010 video.
“I was shocked that my friends were going do to this on my behalf but I tried to convince them not to because of the time commitment. They wouldn’t budge, so I gratefully thanked them. I am lucky to have many good friends,” David said via email from St. Clare’s Hospital in Denville. Side effects from his chemotherapy made it too difficult for him to speak over the phone.
Alice Cutler of Morristown co-organized the Tartan Day festivities and is helping with the fundraiser.
“It’s very easy to want to help David when you meet him,” she said. “He’s such a great guy.”
The sentiment was echoed by Marianne Kirkpatrick, whose son Payton has played with the Rampant Lion Pipe Band for two years. The Scottish pipers and drummers are recognized as the official band of Ellis Island, and they are scheduled to march down New York’s Fifth Avenue in Saturday’s Tartan Day Parade.
“It’s hard to see David so sick,” Marianne said. “He gives 120 percent of all he has for everything that he does. There isn’t anything he wouldn’t do for somebody. He has an enormous heart. He sees potential in every kid he meets.”
David is hoping to make an appearance at the St. Peter’s event.
“I’ve been hospitalized after every treatment as the chemo is so severe on my body,” said the Basking Ridge resident.
“I had known that cancer was a horrible, debilitating disease, but I could never have imagined the intense physical (and mental) pain and stress one had to actually endure. Quite frankly, if you haven’t had it, you can’t imagine how horrible it is — and I wouldn’t even want to describe the details.
“It both scares and saddens me to think of the people who are worse off than I in this cancer war. I pray to God for the strength to just get through it and am thankful, and pretty lucky, that my physician told me that mine was curable.”
David, 43, joined St. Peter’s after Alice Cutler and Meryl Carmel asked for his help planning last year’s Macculloch Hall bicentennial celebration with Brian Harlow, the church music director at the time.
St. Peter’s acoustics, music programs and medieval architecture resonated with David. And Rector Janet Broderick’s blend of traditional worship with a cerebral modern message impressed him as much as the church’s famed Skinner organ and massive carillon, he said.
All of which begs the question: How does a Palladino become a piper?
“I always have to laugh when I hear that question because it was the Italians who brought the bagpipes to their newly conquered Great Britain, or ‘Britannia’ as they named it,” he said. “I suppose that I could also just tell you that I was half-Scottish.”
David said the bagpipes originated in the Middle East and were brought home by returning Roman legions. Thanks to the reach of the Roman empire, the instrument spread throughout Europe.
“Each country eventually developed their own version…thus while each incarnation can be physically and audibly discerned from the other, they all retain the same basic, primeval, earthy and ancient sound. It is truly the pan-European wind instrument.”
Americans associate bagpipes with Scotland because of another empire, David said.
Famous Scottish Regiments of the British Army such as the Black Watch and the Scots Guards took their Great Highland Bagpipes “to every battlefield, victory parade and occupational force in places strewn throughout the world,” he said. “Literally, the sun never set on the British Empire.”
David Palladino performs at 2010 Fall Festival on the Morristown Green
