[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jk6yY_AJzI0[/youtube]

Dental offices often offer quiet, stuffy, stark environs marked primarily with tidy piles of drab magazines and the occasional framed painting on a white wall. So the player piano in Dr. T. Bob Davis’ Lake Highlands waiting room is striking  — even more so when he steps out of his examination room to play a ditty (which he says he doesn’t do as often as he’d like — he’s got teeth to fix, you understand).

Pleasant tunes, a fireplace and big comfy swivel rocking chairs keep you atypically cozy while awaiting your root canal. There’s nothing typical about this dentist, in fact — for the past 33 years he has led mission trips to Matamoras, Mexico, to treat children at the Matamoras Orphanage. Last month he led a group of 100 or so dental students and volunteer doctors who treated about 200 children.

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He loves tinkling the keys for kids at the orphanage or in his office, but he also has recorded seven albums. In 2002 one of them was nominated for a Grammy. “All of my recordings are sacred/inspirational, but the Grammys don’t have that category, so I was nominated in the ‘pop/instrumental’ category,” he says. “But I like playing anything — pop, country and western, the music of yesteryear — and I’ll do banquets, weddings and, sometimes, a funeral.”