Margaret Klemm Pulled a Few Strings; Now, She’s a Class Act

The softness of her voice, the music she plays and the elegant gowns she wears tells you that harpist Margaret A. Klemm, 34, of Irvine is a class act.

But instead of the concert hall, Klemm plays relaxing music for gourmet diners. And for weddings, bar mitzvah receptions and sometimes for funerals.

“On occasions people want to make the funeral a memorial with music,” said Klemm, who studied at the University of Illinois and in Austria. “It’s very touching when it includes music from the harp.”

But mostly she plays dinner music five nights a week at JW’s in the Anaheim Marriott Hotel and supplements that with music lessons, occasional cable television performances, receptions and openings of high-priced stores.

Other times she works out at a gym to keep her in shape to play her 47-string gold harp. “If you’re not physically fit, playing the harp can drain you,” said Klemm, who totes her harp with her in a station wagon. “Moving the harp also helps keep me in shape.”

A doctor soothed by her dinner performance suggested she make relaxation tapes playing harp music to help slow today’s fast-paced society. “I might do that,” she said.

Klemm said the harp is traditionally thought of for classical music, “but I like to expand people’s thinking to other types of music.” Besides playing standard tunes on the harp for the dinner crowd, her repertoire now includes jazz.

“I like to be individualistic and look for the different,” she said. “When I first started in music, I thought I could make a statement with the harp.” Her latest thought is to integrate the harp in chamber music.

During her earlier learning years, Klemm said, she took lessons and played in an Austrian opera house and more recently soloed with the Saddleback Symphony Orchestra. She is soon to play again with the orchestra. “The harp is an elegant-looking instrument and fits nicely in a full orchestra,” she said.

While she believes that playing classical music in orchestras is in her range, “I still feel satisfied playing to a roomful of people enjoying an elegant dinner, especially when they tell me the music made the meal a better dining experience.”

The tips she receives makes her evening a better experience, too.

Roger Joseph, 48, of Orange, is just at the spadework level trying to interpret what Christopher Columbus and other Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and English explorers thought when they met people of the New World nearly 500 years ago.

“Sooner or later I hope to have some understanding of the messages those people wrote,” said Joseph, a Cal State Fullerton anthropology professor who is financing his study with a $27,500 fellowship. “Each had a different prism they looked through at the people in the New World.”

His motive is to study the culture of Europe as seen through the experience of the explorers in America “but that’s quite a switch for me. I’ve been working on contemporary culture all these years, and now I’m working on people that have been dead for nearly 500 years.”

Ghost busting is big these days, so it seemed right that the Newport Beach Business Club keep on top of the phenomenon. The club hosted psychic Nonie Fagatt of Beverly Hills, who is credited with exorcising a spirit that walked the warehouse of Sabatasso Foods in Santa Ana.

The walking spirit, according to Cherie Kerr Doremus of Huntington Beach, who helped during the exorcism, was later identified as a one-time employee who died suddenly and came back to the warehouse. Now the footsteps are gone.

During her talk Fagatt outlined the following anecdotes:

- Ghosts usually hang around after death because they don’t know they are dead, and they like the familiar surroundings of their workplace or home.

- Ghostly personalities are not better or worse than they were in life.

- The sight, touch, sound and smell senses of a psychic can pick up the sense of a spirit present.

- England and Egypt have a higher proportion of ghosts than most places because of the “receptivity” of building materials used in castles and pyramids.

- While she makes her living as a psychic, Fagatt exorcises for free, saying it’s her “gift” to others.

She also sponsors ghost tours.

Acknowledgments--Keith Brigman of Irvine, selected by California Special Olympics directors to receive John West Memorial Award as outstanding coach/volunteer for the Special Olympics. He is an adaptive physical education teacher at Mitchell School in Santa Ana.