Meet Sharon Abreu and you’ll immediately feel how positive, talented, and humble she is. She is always upbeat, and when she feels there needs to be change in the world, she uses the performing arts to kindly, respectfully, and creatively confront environmental and political issues. I have observed her from afar for many years (as we islanders often do of each other), and she strikes me as the kind of person that looks out for everyone and everything; the kind of person who would be there for anyone; the kind of person who walks her talk honestly, quietly, and peacefully. Sharon is always involved in various projects, and it dawned on me that I need to know more about her! If you haven’t yet, meet Sharon Abreu…
1. I was born in Queens, New York City, and grew up in the suburbs of Long Island, which I didn’t especially like. To me it felt devoid of character and community.
2. I had a difficult relationship with my dad, but I appreciate that he taught me the names of all the trees and shrubs around our house. I was lucky to have a loving, compassionate mom with a good sense of humor, who also loved to sing and played the piano. Growing up, I developed a love for Nature and a strong distaste for injustice for myself and other people.
3. At age 2 or 3, I fell into the toilet and asked my parents, “Why didn’t you fluss me?” I guess I didn’t think too much of myself. It seemed to me that once I fell in, it was the logical thing to do.
4. My parents took my sister and me to Broadway shows and operas in Manhattan, which we loved. It was great to develop a comfort with the city and the diversity of people in the city and to be exposed to such top-level performances at an early age.
5. I always loved animals. As a little kid, my parents took us to a petting zoo a few times where we got to feed baby animals. I grew up with cats, turtles, parakeets and a Shetland sheepdog named Robby, named after the Scottish poet, Robert Burns. I first rode a horse at age 12 at Brickman’s resort in the Catskills. I used money I’d been given for my birthday to take horseback riding lessons.
6. I loved Broadway musicals. I would listen to my parents’ 33- and 78-rpm Broadway soundtracks and watch movie musicals on TV. On the commercial breaks I would walk around the house with a feeling like something was going to happen, feeling excited. Years later, I interpreted that feeling as “I want to do that!” I chickened out of being a munchkin in The Wizard of Oz in 6th grade, but I started playing violin in the pit orchestra for musicals in junior high and high school and got on stage a bit as well, though not as a soloist. I thought I would always be too nervous and self-conscious to be a soloist.
7. I went to Usdan Center for the Arts day camp on Long Island for three summers, where I played violin in the orchestra, sang in the chorus, studied folk guitar and painting with acrylics. I painted a giant panda, which came out pretty good, but I decided visual art wasn’t my strength.
8. As much as I loved sledding, swimming and hiking, I went skiing only once, and couldn’t make it up the bunny hill. I decided I was a cocoa-in-the-lodge kind of skier.
9. I played violin in the New York Youth Symphony in Carnegie Hall when I was in high school and used birthday money to pay for classes in the Manhattan School of Music pre-college program. So I was taking the Long Island Railroad into the city on weekends when I was in high school. I couldn’t wait to graduate and move into the city for college.
10. I received the Senior Award for Excellence in Music at my high school. I’m not sure I would have gotten the award, but in addition to playing violin in the orchestra and pit orchestras, singing in the small choir and women’s double barbershop quartet, and playing piano for the big chorus, I was also accompanying students participating in the New York State School Music Association (NYSSMA) ratings and I ended up doing some of that accompanying with a concussion after being in a car accident when I was 17. (I still have scar tissue in my left upper lip from that accident.)
11. In my senior year of high school, I got caught passing a note in English class. I passed the note and started laughing so hard that my desk was shaking. The teacher noticed and asked if I would like to share the joke with the class. I declined. I had a bad case of “senioritis.” Music, Monty Python and Saturday Night Live helped me survive junior high and high school.
12. I was a huge Beatles fan. John was my favorite. In high school and college, I attended some Beatlefests in NY and NJ. One year, I was a finalist in Beatlefest sound-alike contest. I sang Yoko Ono’s “Who Has Seen the Wind?” and won a picture of George Harrison. The night John Lennon was shot, I was home on Long Island, listening to the radio to get the weather forecast, while the Abbey Road album was playing on my turntable. As I heard the news that John Lennon had been shot, the song “The End” was playing on my phonograph.
13. I received a B.S. (really) degree in Music, Business & Technology from New York University, and decided I needed to be a singer, so I went into therapy to learn to feel okay with people looking at me. I gained the confidence to pursue singing because of the Choral Arts Society at NYU. In the big chorus, I got to sing for the NBC Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony two years in a row. I sang in the small Chorale and started a “Beautyshop” quartet, which had a healthy competitiveness with the men’s barbershop quartet to see which group could make the audience laugh harder. Not above a cheap laugh, we girls would dress up in various costumes, from bathrobes and shower caps to fake mustaches. It was great fun and I miss it.
14. I won WNCN classical radio’s “Carnegie Hall Deli Sandwich Contest” in 1991, honoring Carnegie Hall on its centennial anniversary. I spent most of the $100 gift certificate to the deli on cheesecake. (I did not eat it all myself!) There was a publicity event during which Isaac Stern, who was the president of Carnegie Hall at the time, and who saved it from demolition, had to eat my winning sandwich, the “encore sandwich”. It had prime rib for all the prime performances, droplets of fine wine, plum tomatoes for the aplomb of the eager audiences, turkey for all the critics who dared to criticize, all on toast, for the toast of the town that is Carnegie Hall.
15. I actually hated opera as a kid because my dad would blast “Live from the MET” on the radio every Saturday and it was inescapable no matter where I went in the house. Dad couldn’t tolerate Simon & Garfunkel at the lowest volume on my turntable with my bedroom door closed. I’m picky about what styles of opera I like, but I did develop a love for it. I got to sing in several operas in New York, though I was never able to sing at the level I wanted to. My favorite operas were, and are, Mozart’s comic operas. I had a laughing fit once during a rehearsal of Mozart’s Cosí fan tutte, in which I was singing the role of Despina, the scheming maid. I also loved singing Zerlina in Don Giovanni (my first big role) and Papagena in The Magic Flute. But my favorite operatic experience was singing the role of Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro. After doing that I thought, “I can die now.” I also got to sing in a professional master class led by Metropolitan Opera soprano Licia Albanese at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City and received a treasured compliment (which I have on tape) from Madame Albanese: “THIS is Puccini!” When I started doing opera, I had no idea how to use my body on stage, but I had some excellent teachers: Tony Amato (Amato Opera), Richard Crittenden (Aquarius Opera Workshop), Dick Jones (Chicago Lyric Opera), and Licia Albanese, who, like Tony Amato, could model any character of any age in an instant.
16. In 1992, I went to a cute little pumpkin festival in the West Village with great folk music (I always loved and did folk music), lots of pumpkins and really interesting environmental displays. I ended up joining the host organization, Hudson River Sloop Clearwater, started by legendary folk singer Pete Seeger in the 1960s. I started using my voice and songs for environmental education. I learned so much about how everything is related to everything else – how politics, water, air, soil, human health, economic, environmental and social justice are all intertwined.
17. I got to perform in concert with Pete Seeger, and I also got to sing for Wangari Maathai, the first African woman and first environmentalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
18. In 1998, I was hired to sing for a Trade Union candle lighting ceremony on the annual Day of Mourning for Dead and Injured Workers at the United Nations as part of the U.N. Commission on Sustainable Development. I ended up joining the Trade Union delegation and for 10 years I functioned as a Trade Union Major Group liaison to some of the environmental caucuses and the Education Caucus. I also composed a couple of pieces and performed them for those ceremonies at the U.N. One year the focus was on agricultural workers getting sick from exposure to toxins like pesticides. I appreciated how the international Trade Union delegation cared as much about the environment and human health as they did about jobs. That’s where I learned about the concept of “Just Transition” programs, which are still very slow to get off the ground in the U.S. over 20 years after I learned about them at the U.N.
19. For a couple of years, I sang in a five-person busker act called “Whatever4”, as “Waffle from Belgium” and “Teaklebird Fishholler, the three-time hog tying champion from Texas.” We started out singing for the New York Buskers Fare in lower Manhattan and ended up going to Manchester, England to sing in the Streets Ahead Festival. It was great fun, but we came to the painful realization that a five-person busker act was ultimately not going to be economically viable.
20. I’ve sung at Elderhostels for people who had Nazi concentration camp numbers on their arms. My great-grandparents fled the pogroms of Eastern Europe in the late 1800s and early 1900s. One of my maternal grandfather’s brothers perished in the Holocaust. It’s occurred to me that I may be feeling the collective anxiety of generations of my Eastern European Jewish ancestors coursing through my veins.
21. In New York in 1998, I met this guy named Michael Hurwicz at a Greenwich Village folk music coffeehouse, the People’s Voice Café. We started doing music together. It turned out he was only living in New York temporarily, and was planning to eventually move back to his home on Orcas Island. In 2001, we came to live on Orcas together and have been living here ever since.
22. I never made my own coleslaw, guacamole, borscht, or did anything with rhubarb, before moving to Orcas.
23. In 2002 (20 years ago??!!) I starred in a sold-out run of The Taffetas at Orcas Center and the Bellingham Ferry Terminal, along with Holly King and Christiana Speed as two of my singing sisters, and Patty Johnson and Jim Shaffer-Bauck as our band. The show was a goofy romp and a great excuse to sing some fabulous arrangements of hit songs from the 1950s. I later performed in the Actors Theater of Orcas Island’s production of The Vagina Monologues — a profound experience. That was the inspiration for my own one-woman show, The Climate Monologues, I wrote a few years later. The two shows have this in common: Both deal with an uncomfortable subject, but when you see the show, you’ll be glad you did.
24. Also in 2002, Mike and I started the nonprofit Irthlingz Arts-Based Environmental Education to engage, inspire and empower people to become active stewards of the Earth. We’ve had quite a lot of unique and gratifying experiences over the last 20 years (20 years??!!), including working with students in our local schools and singing at lots of events, and we’re looking forward to more!
25. Helen Schucman, the woman who “scribed” the well-known spiritual book A Course in Miracles, was a relative of mine by marriage. Her husband, Louis Schucman, was my maternal grandmother’s first cousin. My mom used to go to Louis’ mother’s house in Brooklyn when she was a girl. Louis’ mother had a thick Yiddish accent and she had a parakeet that also had a thick Yiddish accent, repeating things like, “Vatsa mattah vitchu?!” I never knew Helen very well, but I became interested in A Course in Miracles after having dinner with two other couples at our house on Orcas and learning they had studied the Course. Mike and I studied the whole Course together, and I have found it really helpful. I’ve set some of the lessons to music and recorded them as “Miracle Jingles.”
26. In 2012, Mike and I got certified to teach The Connection Practice, which uses the basics of Nonviolent Communication and the core techniques from the Institute of HeartMath to help people get more calm and centered, work out problems more easily, and improve relationships with other people. I would like to bring this practice into every school in America! It’s helped us a lot and I believe it would help people learn how to listen and communicate much more constructively than what has become the norm in our society.
27. Recently I sang for a couple of friends who were dying. It felt like a great honor. Over the years, I’ve come to feel like singing is an act of healing, for myself and for others. As I approach a new decade and go forward in my life, it’s my great hope that I’ll be able to use my music and singing as a source of comfort and healing for others.
Thank you so much, Sharon.
If you haven’t seen Sharon perform, you’ve got to watch these clips:
