The Kelowna Community Chorus poses in front of Carnegie Hall. Sue Skinner is to the left of Bill Arkinstall, seated.
By Sue Skinner
I’m an addict. Have been since I was three – 100 years and trying not to count.
That was when I cut my first record — You Are My Sunshine, a 78. OK, it was my parents’ record-making machine. I had an adoring and supportive audience.
I was hooked. Who doesn’t love to be famous at three?
No one chooses to be an artist. Who would choose to make less money, work harder and outlive what would be a short career?
Art chooses you and, if you are lucky, you accept the challenge.
I don’t have any money. I’m still working hard. I teach Voice at Wentworth Music, conduct Kelowna Community Chorus and I act and sing when Kelowna Actor’s Studio sees fit.
I go from 6 a.m. to midnight for a little more than minimum wage, and I’m grateful that I was chosen.
I’m still hooked. I will tap dance and sing — You Are My Sunshine – all the way to my grave. Happy to have been chosen.
Full disclosure: I took a detour after the early record-breaking record. I quickly forgot about singing and became a much nicer person (just kidding) and did sports and dance until I was in the high-school musical.
I was singing the opening number in My Fair Lady as the curtain opened. It rolled me up in it, carried me over the orchestra pit, and put me down, ever so gently, back on the stage. I loved the look of fear on the faces of the musicians and audience.
I straightened my hat, and finished my song. Was I horrified or embarrassed? Nah, the show must go on and it was great to fly solo.
I was hooked.
I have travelled the world, learned many languages, seen every little town in Alberta and supported myself with music all my life.
I have sung at weddings, funerals, musicals, operettas, opera, with symphonies, guitars, jazz groups, rock bands and at play schools.
My adventure with singing has taken me to some very strange and wonderful places where I have met stranger and even more wonderful people.
Surprise, there are many people just like me out there. People willing to volunteer hundreds of hours behind the scenes to bring art to you and a few fools who think singing in front of a thousand people is fun! Whee!
Volunteers made — and still make — possible many of the gigs we professional, though underpaid, singers and musicians do for a living.
Like this one, in my early career. After finishing university, I did score some paying gigs with Seattle Opera and did a series of community/Seattle Opera joint productions
This meant Seattle Opera supplied profession singers (me!) and a pianist. The community provided the director, sets, chorus, etc. We did El Capitan by John Philip Sousa. Yes, the marching band composer.
The town recruited a contractor for their set designer, an English teacher who had never seen a musical and eight men to be the great armies of Spain and the uprising peasants. We arrived three days before opening to find they had built a wall – unmovable, huge and with only one regular door in the middle and no side stages.
What fun trying to squeeze through the entrance or getting off stage in time.
My most memorable moment happened when the Conquistadors, all in helmets, and armour, left the stage to become immediately the uprising peasants.
The stage went empty and stayed that way. Finally, the frustrated director yelled from the audience, “Where are you?”
An indignant chorister came on stage in his underwear and yelled back, “We have a costume change,” and stomped off.
I was still hooked.
Yes, live art is exciting and impossible without the hard work of volunteers.
The pandemic has taught us how empty the world would be without artists/risk takers, and volunteers.
In future columns, I hope to show who is out there and what they’re doing along with some anecdotes. I know I’m not the only crazy one. You will have a chance to meet the others.
Hooked and proud of it.
Susan Skinner is a singer of opera and musical theatre, a choral conductor and a teacher/coach of voice. She has taken two choirs to Carnegie Hall, sung around the world, and teaches for Wentworth Music on Zoom.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
