They say they were like two ships passing in the night. For
years, they heard about each other
– from their mutual accompanist, from friends at church, through
the grapevine. But it wasn’t until a run-in about 18 months ago
with a shared friend at Trader Joe’s – on the same day, within
hours of each other – that soprano Deborah Colling and tenor Les
Stringfellow finally connected.
They say they were like two ships passing in the night. For years, they heard about each other – from their mutual accompanist, from friends at church, through the grapevine. But it wasn’t until a run-in about 18 months ago with a shared friend at Trader Joe’s – on the same day, within hours of each other – that soprano Deborah Colling and tenor Les Stringfellow finally connected.
“Rosemary asked me what I was doing with my voice,” Colling said about her morning meeting with friend Rosemary Smith, who works at Trader Joe’s.
“Then I walked in, and Rosemary said ‘what are you doing? You must call Deborah,'” Stringfellow said.
Colling’s operatic voice is just the right medium of saccharine and power, and Stringfellow carries the same bold tune with a reach high into the tenor octave. Together, they make beautiful music.
“I actually had tears in my eyes,” Maureen Drewniany said, about her first listen, on CD no less, to the duo.
Drewniany, Morgan Hill’s recreation supervisor, was approached by the two singers to perform at the amphitheater. She said yes.
The pair performed together for the first time last year at the Church of Jesus Christ, Latter-day Saints in Oakland. Their chemistry on stage was unmatched.
“It’s a wonderful, wonderful gift to the Morgan Hill community,” Drewniany said.
The admission price can’t be beat – free – but it’s the duet’s vision of sharing music with the community in open amphitheaters that is worth much more.
For now, they are doing it on their own dime.
“He needs to retire. No one can do what he’s doing,” Colling, 45, said. Stringfellow is in year 23 of working for the United Postal Service and for 10 years he’s driven a feeder truck from San Jose to Oakland three times a day at the strangest of hours, leaving his home in Los Banos about 5 p.m. driving until 5 a.m.
And yes, Stringfellow often sings while he drives the big brown truck.
“People are always saying ‘Why do you drive a truck?’ ‘What are you doing wearing a uniform?'” Stringfellow, 56, said. His facial expressions are dynamic, which has served him well through his many years of performing in musical theater and with the Santa Clara Chorale. Stringfellow also dedicates time to his church, as its musical director, organist and conductor.
As a boy growing up in Montana, he waited with stars in his eyes to enter sixth-grade: the first eligible year to join marching band. He took to the baritone, or lugged it, the thing was bigger than he.
His love of singing crept sheepishly into his purview in sixth-grade, too. The band went on an extended over-night trip, which his parents didn’t allow him to attend, so he stood-in with the choir. Two solos and six weeks later of moonlighting as a choir singer, Stringfellow discovered his voice, though it wouldn’t be until he was about 19 that he would seriously pursue it.
He moved to playing the trombone, bringing the instrument with him to the University of Idaho, where he switched his major to studying vocals. Following a mission in Missouri and Minnesota and short stint at Brigham Young University, he moved to San Francisco with the goal of joining the Conservatory of Music. Making a living to support a new wife in 1978 and four children, now aged 21 to 30, came first.
Colling, who hails from Canada, found success early. In her 20s she sang on public access TV, for a segment of the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary; she traveled, toured and found some fame in British Columbia and Alberta, Hawaii where she went to college, Holland and eventually landed in Japan, where she met her now-estranged husband. They married in 1989 and had four children, ages 19, 17, 7 and 4. Since she became a single mother three years ago, she’s answered the weighty call to raise her children alone.
Colling said she and Stringfellow connected on a deeper level than simply their affection for music of the Mormon Church, their similar training or that they each were parents of four children. Through their close, platonic relationship – Stringfellow will celebrate his 32nd wedding anniversary with his wife Saturday – the pair has found solace in their common struggles.
Alone, they each have trudged through strained marriages, battled with preserving their self-worth and grappled with perfectionist tendencies.
Colling runs a performing arts studio, teaches piano lessons, has a degree in elementary education, a masters in counseling psychology and is the children’s music director at the local Mormon Church. While she seemingly has a full and happy life now, the fact that she did lose two notes from the high register because of her age has affected her gift; “But what I have now is confidence, and depth.”
Yet, with the challenges, come great joys, Colling said. Singing is their playtime. It’s their wholesome hobby to soothe and to heal. And Stringfellow keeps Colling laughing with his eccentric personality and kooky sense of humor.
“We’ve fit music into the cracks of everything else,” Stringfellow said.
The pair hope to record and release a CD in the next few years and continue singing at the Oakland Temple and for whomever will clear an amphitheater for them to sing.
Their accompanists for Saturday, concert pianist Holly Lasky and children’s art and music teacher Lynda Bassett, became a performing troupe by coincidence, they say.
For 25 years, Bassett maintains, she has accompanied both Stringfellow and Colling, though never together. For years, she says again, and just like Rosemary she desperately wanted the two to meet and to sing.
“‘I have this beautiful soprano’ I would tell Les,” Bassett said after a sound check Wednesday at the amphitheater. “And ‘I have this amazing tenor,’ I would tell Deborah.’ It’s a dream come true that they’re singing together,” she said.
“I think they will always (sing) together,” she said.
