My name is Marcia and music is a big part of my life! As a child, my parents were both musical with my mom playing piano and teaching piano lessons and my dad whistling and singing around the house. I remember loving to listen to records, especially when we got a console stereo and I could sit in a corner right next to the speaker. I really liked the sing-alongs like Bing Crosby and Mitch Miller as well as musicals like The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins.
At age seven, I started taking piano lessons, but not from my mom! She was smart enough to send me to a different teacher; it was tough enough to get me to practice. But I did practice and kept taking lessons all the way through college. I majored in Music Education, but after student teaching was quite sure I did not want to teach large groups of kids.
Instead, I have done multiple musical things as part of my job, part-time jobs, or just for fun. I accompanied at a high school, taught lots of private lessons, sang and played at a bar in Omaha, participated in community theater musicals both onstage and in the pit. Needless to say, if I’m not doing something musical, it just feels like something is missing in my life!
My husband and I moved to Greeley from the Detroit area in 2015 to be closer to my aging father, especially since my mother had died suddenly the year before. I was fortunate to be able to continue with my job at Konica Minolta doing customer training on the copiers we sell so they can be comfortable using all the ever-expanding features like scanning and printing.
The last choir I was part of in Michigan is a women’s choir called Renaissance Voices consisting of 20 or fewer voices, which I sang with for ten years. When we moved to Greeley, I already knew about the Chorale from my parents’ attendance at their concerts and Pops & Pasta shows. I went to the 50th anniversary concert to make sure, then auditioned for the group in August of 2015. I began singing in the Soprano section as a second soprano, and have been loving it ever since.
It’s been a big adjustment to be part of such a huge group, but I have come to know many of the members and marvel at all the talent in the group. I feel honored to be part of such a rich tradition in the Greeley Chorale and look forward to many years singing together!