User Profile

Recently I've been joking that God must have been drinking when I was invented: I suppose you could say that I'm something of a modern Renaissance woman. By day, I'm a nerd. I own SheTech and Company, a marketing and PR firm specializing in internet marketing. I also write technical manuals and develop multimedia training materials; I have been a Managing Editor for an online technical journal (the erstwhile NetPerformance.com), a technical support engineer for one software company, CollabNet, and part time technical support manager for another, GraphOn Corporation. But when I'm not writing manuals or babbling with customers, I'm singing, which is my first and greatest love, and the only thing that keeps me sane.

Once upon a time, I wanted to be a rock-n-roll singer (remember Pat Benatar? -- she was my hero, and now you have an idea of my age), but I learned that many of the great women of rock studied classical voice first. So, thought I, I should do the same. At age 16, I began studying voice seriously.

That's when I met Puccini. And I've never been the same.

The very first aria I ever heard was Leontyne Price's "Un bel di vedremo" from Butterfly. It doesn't get any better than that. I cried my eyes out, bought her RCA recording of the whole opera, studied other recordings of the same opera, then started branching out, diving into Puccini and Verdi's worlds of love and drama, death and tragedy. Opera was the siren for my soul in a way no other music had ever been. I bagged all dreams of being in the pop/rock world and turned myself over to the wonder and drama of Puccini, Verdi, Schubert, Wagner, Rossini, Debussy, Poulenc, Rorem and all the other great composers to whom I was introduced in those years. And, silly me, I got my degree in Voice Performance from Northern Illinois University -- a little state school with a great music program, home to such notables as the Vermeer String Quartet -- studying with bass Myron Myers.

Since graduation, I've traveled much in my adult life, and have spent time in Los Angeles, Buffalo, San Francisco and other great places. I have had the good fortune to perform with The Lamplighters, a light opera repertory company in San Francisco that specializes in Gilbert and Sullivan and similar productions. While in San Francisco, I also sang the leading role in "The Star" ("L'Etoile") by Emannuel Chabrier, with Pocket Opera, another light opera group which presents operas in English (in great translations by its director, Donald Pippin). Pippin's work and Chabrier's music helped to inspire a growing fondness for fin-de-siècle French music, and to this day Chabrier and his contemporaries just... send me! I continue to study and perform regularly, and in fact, have had a number of recitals in the Seattle area, appearing a few times on KING-FM's "Live! by George" with pianist Violetta Decyatnik and other artists. I took some time off from my normally busy performing schedule to reshape my vocal technique with the help of a new vocal coach, Neal Goren, in New York City.

It's a small town, Seattle is, particularly when it comes to the musical life. After a few appearances on the "Live! by George" program in 1998 and '99, George Shangrow honored me by inviting me to sing in his church choir at University Christian Church (he's great fun to work with!), and a couple of weeks later offered me a solo role with Orchestra Seattle/Seattle Chamber Singers' performance of Antonin Dvorak's Stabat Mater. In between all that, he also happened to mention that KING-FM was looking for part-time announcers. Never one to turn down a radio gig, I gladly jumped through the appropriate hoops, and found myself on the part-time staff. And tickled about it, too!

Connections led to other connections, and in the 1998-1999 season I performed twice on short notice with the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra; together we also completed a lovely performance of Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and most recently Richard Strauss' Vier Letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) and Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 4. You may have even heard me at the beginning of the 1999-2000 season as the soprano soloist in the Opening Gala performance of Orchestra Seattle/Seattle Chamber Singers' Serenade to Music (Ralph Vaughan Williams), which was broadcast live on KING-FM on October 24th, 1999, or on Tuesday night, May 22, 2001 in a broadcast of the Seattle Philharmonic's Strauss/Mahler concert!

You might be wondering how I came to be part of the KING-FM staff: I have had a love affair with radio since my college days at WNIU-FM, a public classical/jazz/news station in DeKalb, Illinois. At the time I didn't think I had a technical bone in my body (I've since upgraded my brain) but I could pronounce Galina Vishnyevskaya without hurting myself, so they hired me. I worked for WNIU for three years; two as a student part time announcer, and one full time as Chief Announcer after graduating in 1988. Funny thing about radio: it's a small world, too! It turns out that another KING-FM announcer, Steve Reeder, was at WFMT in Chicago, only 60 miles away, at the same time I was at WNIU. I listened often, and enjoyed his work then as well as now; I guess that explains why his voice was so familiar when I heard him on KING-FM for the first time...

After making a fool of myself during a panel discussion at an AMPPR (American Music Personnel in Public Radio -- I think) conference in 1989, I was invited to Buffalo, New York, to work for WNED-FM. No, WNIU didn't fire me -- fortunately, I didn't make that much of a fool of myself! I spent two very enjoyable years at WNED-FM, until moving to North Carolina in 1991. There wasn't much radio work to be had there -- budgets were pretty tight, and there was a hiring freeze at many public broadcasting stations. That was how I got into computers: I still had to pay the rent, and I had since learned my way around a computer keyboard, at least enough to be a wiz at WordPerfect 5.1... gosh, how much the technology has changed since then!

After a brief jaunt to Los Angeles the following year, I settled in San Francisco for a few years where I juggled computers, radio (at KQED-FM) and music in much the same way as I do now. Although still one of the premier public radio stations in the country, sadly, by then KQED-FM had switched to an NPR/PRI news and information format, and I sure missed classical music broadcasting.

When a friend invited me to visit Seattle for a long weekend, I accepted, and left my heart here when I had to return home. Some leave their heart in San Francisco... mine got dropped somewhere in Seattle. So, rather than retrieve my heart, I decided to follow it; it and I stayed here and Seattle has been home ever since.

I was fortunate enough for a while to have lived in a place with a great view of the Olympic Peninsula, the Space Needle, and a little sliver of Elliot Bay. It was great, and then I was graciously allowed by my two chats adorables, Mewsetta and Tigger, to live in a really cute little house north of town. I have since had to give up the kitties (I'm allergic!) and the house (hard to keep it up while spending most of my time in New York), but I have to tell you about my little pals: Tigger is pretty self-evident, an orange tabby that has grown huge and lovable. I must tell you the story of Mewsetta's name: for a very brief time in 1997, I returned to WNED in Buffalo, and adopted a kitten to keep me company. I decided to have a contest on the air: "help me name my kitten, and you'll win a CD...", with the stipulation that the name had to be both cat- and music-related, for instance, "Dame Myra Hiss" or some such (I tossed that one to the listeners as an example to get things rolling). I received many terrific responses ("Clawed Debussy", "Sharpless" -- especially for a male cat that had been declawed, "Meowzart", etc.), but "Mewsetta" jumped out at me, particularly since "Musetta" (from Puccini's La Bohème) was a role I studied at one point. True to her name, she is a flirt, and as capricious as can be, but deep down inside knows what true love is.

I left Seattle (ALAS!) to live in New York City for a while, continuing to train with Neal Goren and also Thomas Wolf. I had to leave Mewsetta behind, but she lives with a dear family who treats her well (they sent me a picture a while back that showed her sitting at the kitchen screen door, avidly watching squirrel traffic).

Now I live just outside of Knoxville, Tennessee with my mother. It's a beautiful life here in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. I still spend time in NYC, teaching voice students there and working here.

Life Is Good!

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