Time for the Timeless Song : Woman Trained as Dancer, Then Paralyzed, Carries a Note of Whimsy

Weslia Whitfield’s story gives new meaning to the concept of hanging in there and taking life as it comes.

This week, she’ll continue singing in a month-long engagement at Saddleback College. In the fall, she’ll be back at her regular agenda, working around San Francisco, and in March she willmake her first appearance at the prestigious Oak Room in New York City’s Algonquin Hotel. Her two most recent recordings are doing well, and a new album of ballads is in the hopper.

There was a time when such a plateful of activities would have seemed like pie in the sky to her.

Trained as a dancer and an actress at San Francisco State University, Whitfield was working hard on career in 1977 when she was shot in the back during a mugging. Suspects still have not been apprehended.

The single .22-caliber bullet lodged in her spine; within days, it was clear that she would not walk again. Several dark, chaotic years followed before Whitfield realized that her talent had not been paralyzed with her legs.

By 1980, she was beginning to perform in San Francisco cabarets. A brief, rapturous but ultimately unhappy love affair had the unexpectedly positive result of giving her new perspective on her material.

“That relationship, miserable as it turned out to be, was the first time since I was shot that I once again had a sense of myself as a sexual being,” she explained candidly. “All the love songs I’d sung became real to me. There was no more room for phony emotions.”

Five and a half years ago, a happy, productive marriage to her pianist-arranger, Mike Greensill, capped a recovery that Whitfield only could have dreamed about in the desolate months that followed the shooting.

These days, a natural quality of whimsy flows through her conversation, and she says she feels very much in control.

“Oh, yes, I speak up for myself now. Even in the way I relate to Michael. For example, he comes from a jazz background, and I come from a classical background, and because classical musicians can be intimidated by jazz musicians, Michael for so many years was the authority on what was hip and what wasn’t. Now, I just speak up and say, “Oh, yes, it is hip.’ Or, ‘I don’t care if it is or it isn’t, this is what I’m doing.”’

At Saddleback, she and Greensill are doing a survey of the great American popular song. And they are doing it in a way that spotlights Whitfield’s warm, lovely voice and smoothly articulate phrasing while carefully avoiding the banalities of recycling old material.

“We’re trying to do a mix of tunes that are well known, along with things that aren’t so well known because we live in fear that someone will perceive us as a nostalgia act, which we definitely are not,” Whitfield said. “These songs, I feel, are, if I can use the word, timeless. They speak to me as much as they speak to the people in my audience who heard them when they first came out.

“We might juxtapose a classic like ‘A Kiss to Build a Dream On’ with something much newer like ‘In Your Own Quiet Way.’ Because I think that if I just do things that an audience knows, I’m doing them a disservice. An obscure song is only a song that you don’t know. And as soon as I finish it, you’ll know it.”

* Weslia Whitfield sings through Sunday in the Cabaret Theatre at Saddleback College, 28000 Marguerite Parkway, Mission Viejo. Show times: 7:30 p.m. today; 7:30 and 9:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 3:30 p.m. Sunday. $13. (714) 582-4656.