She’s not young. She’s not beautiful. She’s been married for 37-and-a half years. She’s been battling Rheumatoid Arthritis for 20 of those years. She has two sons, two grandkids. She’s still trying to complete her Master’s Degree, get her Doctorate, write “The End” to her best-selling novel. She doesn’t claim to have done anything more extraordinary or compelling than just living a life filled with quiet love, fierce loyalties, odd serendipities, and deep faith. Her grandkids call her “Gaga.” Her sons get a kick out of telling people that their mom is an Anglican nun.
She did make a CD once. She called it “ANUNSEENWORLD.” She included a Grammy-award-winning song, a few other favorites, and a few of her own. Then she smiled and crossed a big one off her bucket list, and thought that was that. But it wasn’t.
Her voices took her to some surprising places in her life. Her church choir voice took her to St. Petersburg, Russia, and to a Billy Graham Crusade in Maryland. Her folk-song voice got her to Branson, Missouri, and a coffeehouse in Wisconsin. Her Broadway voice took her on a surreal adventure in Japan singing the part of King Herod in Jesus Christ, Superstar. But that was long
ago, and she thought those exciting days were done. But they weren’t.
One day a cold and dreary low pressure front made her hurt more than usual. Her thoughts took an uncharacteristically dark turn. She felt like she was dying, and if she did, then what? She was older than the other grandmothers. She couldn’t do half the things they could do. Her grandkids probably wouldn’t even remember her, or if they did, they would only have a vague picture of a cranky old stick-in-the-mud that could never keep up. She wracked her brains for some way of passing on to the young ones something of their heritage from her side of the family, something that would outlast her, something they could keep, something that would let them know how much she loved them. What could she do? “Well,” she thought, brightening a little, “I can sing . . .” And she had an idea.
Laura used her soft voice and made a CD of lullabies. She called it “GRANDMA SINGS,” She made a little book to go along with it, full of coloring pages and quiet activities to help the little ones settle down and get ready for bed. She included the lyrics, too, so her grandkids could sing them to their grandkids. To her surprise the CD did well. Other grandparents wanted it, too, as well as new parents and baby-shower hostesses and church nursery departments. So Laura used her Big Band voice and her jazz voice and her goofy voice and made another CD, “GRANDMA SWINGS,” full of songs from the 40’s her parents had loved. While she was working on the book for that one, she was thinking about the next. Use her big voice and rock out with her favorite songs from the 50’, 60’s, and 70’s? Somehow that project got shelved on the way to the studio, and what came out was “GRANNY SINGS JANNY,” featuring songs from Janny Grein, who was a huge influence in her life in the early days of her faith.
And then her nephew asked her to do some Americana music for his company, Better Music Records, and “DOLLAR BILL,” happened. Laura didn’t even know she had a country voice.
