In fourth grade at Anderson Elementary in San Jose, our teacher cracked open Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and unleashed a literary sugar bomb on the classroom. The characters didn’t just leap off the page—they kicked down the door of our imaginations and set up shop. The book hijacked our brains. Good luck checking it out from the library—there was a waiting list that stretched into eternity.
A year later, the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory hit theaters, but my parents, apparently operating under some moral suspicion of Hollywood whimsy, refused to take me. I wouldn’t see it until the VHS era, when cultural consensus finally upgraded it to “beloved classic” status. That’s when I met Gene Wilder’s Wonka—equal parts sorcerer, satirist, and deranged uncle.
The best moment? Easy. He hobbles out, leaning on a cane like a relic of Victorian fragility—then suddenly drops the act, executes a flawless somersault, and stands up with a gleam that says, I know exactly what game I’m playing, and so should you. That glint in his eye, equal parts wonder and judgment, has haunted me for decades. His entire persona is a velvet-gloved slap to the smug, the spoiled, and the blissfully ignorant. He isn’t just testing children—he’s taking society’s moral pulse and finding a weak, sugary beat.
That gleam stayed with me. So much so that I wrote a piano piece inspired by Wilder’s performance. I called it Gene Wilder’s Prelude to Mischief and Mayhem. The first movement was a nightmare—rewritten more times than I care to admit. Oddly, the second and third movements came first, composed together in the aftermath of my mother’s passing on October 1, 2020. Nearly five years later, I finally completed the first movement, like some strange reverse birth.
The result? A tribute in three acts to the sly grin, the righteous mischief, and the bittersweet brilliance of Gene Wilder—a man who, like the best artists, never let kindness become cowardice or magic become a mask for mediocrity.
Cinemorphosis 
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