Client Cameo: Louise L.

We are pleased to introduce you to Louise L., this month's featured Client Cameo. Louise has been a regular Boulder Carry-Out Caravan client for the past five years. 

Louise was born in Valparaiso, Indiana.  Her mother was a kindergarten teacher and her father was a professor of Religion.  Louise began singing when she was young, and loved museums and classical concerts.  As children, Louise and her sister would sing duets on the radio.  At age twelve, she was crowned the Spelling Queen Alliance in Ohio.

Louise graduated from Earlham College, a private liberal arts college in Richmond, Indiana and that's where she met her husband. He then attended law school at the University of Pennsylvania, and while he studied, Louise cut, sewed and hand-stitched her Sari-style wedding dress, on the long oak tables of the law school.  Her mother-in-law, Sarah, was a member of a group named Fellowship Commission that brought Martin Luther King to Philadelphia to speak every year and Louise was privileged to hear him speak once in person.  Sarah Love was also campaign manager for Philadelphia mayoral candidate Richardson Dilworth, though he did not win.

At one time Louise was an especially gifted singer, and studied voice at The Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and the Academy of Voice Arts for Classical Singing.  In the 1960s, Louise received an actor-singer summer scholarship at University of Colorado where she was a soloist at Macky Auditorium for ‘Dorabella’ in “The Barber of Seville,” and for “Brigadoon” at Red Rocks.

As a result of all that training, she has sung oratorios in Philadelphia.  An Oratorio is a large-scale musical composition for orchestra, choir and soloists, but not theatrical in presentation like an opera.  Her true love is Johann Sebastian Bach's Mass in B Minor.  Louise was a High Holiday Cantor (the person who chants worship services in the synagogue) for three years at Congregation Beth Israel in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania. In addition, for eighteen years she was the Contralto soloist in a professional quartette at the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed synagogue, Beth Sholom in the Philadelphia area. Contralto singers are the rarest female voice type because their range is the lowest and different from a typical alto’s voice range.  Though Louise no longer sings professionally, and lost her voice when she slipped on laundry soap and broke her neck and back two years ago, she sings with the Presbyterian Manor Singers and still fiddles around with French Art songs and German lieder (songs) an octave lower than written!

Forty  years after her scholarship at CU, Louise returned to Boulder to live, because her son Alexander Love was attending the Naropa Institute, now Naropa University. He currently practices Chinese Medicine on West Pearl Street close to her almost 20- year residence at Presbyterian Manor. Louise is a gifted poet, and laughs about having a "megaphone for a voice!" She just published the 66th edition of her informal monthly poetry newsletter for aging adults called, LOVE AND HUG'S  REMNANTS, so that older poets have a topic and a raison d'être  (French for "reason of being") to write and be heard.  She published a letter to the editor of the Boulder Daily Camera about the need for outdoor bathrooms for the unhoused population, as well as placing more welcoming benches in Boulder for people to sit and "rest their weary bones."  The next editorial letter she is pondering writing will pose the question of if, on a sleepy day she were to doze off to sleep on a park bench in Boulder, would she be arrested by the Boulder gendarmes?

Thank you Louise for sharing a little about your interesting life with the Cultivate community! Though we speak to our clients often, we rarely get to really know them in the short time we interact. Our Client Cameos are such a great way to learn more about their talents, passions, knowledge and skills.