Hellene Hiner had her first appearance on the Debra Duncan show (ABC, Houston) on April 10, 2000.
She went to Channel 13 a couple weeks before the show with the video tape of her 2 and 3 year old students playing piano. She was lucky that day to meet a well known T.V. journalist (and her hero), Marvin Zindler, who listened to her ideas with a great deal of curiosity and attention. Marvin Zindler was the one who took her to the supervising producer of the Debra Duncan show and advised demonstrating her teaching methods on live T.V.! The idea to teach a randomly selected child to play piano with two hands in twenty minutes during the show had been born.
Nobody knew how the experiment would turn out. After the crew had visited a school and saw the students, most of them became believers that something special can happen. The results surprised even them. Little 6 year old Ashley, who was picked out of the audience, confessed she had never taken piano lessons before. She was able to play the Hanon #1 exercise and Ludvig Bethoven's "Ode to Joy" with all ten fingers of both hands at the end of the show.
