Turning Up the Voices Within

Marcie Howard probably doesn’t think of herself in such inflated terms, but she is the cherubic incarnation of a particularly local holy trinity: Therapy, entertainment and metaphysics.

Years ago, as she toiled in the office of an entertainment business manager, Howard nourished dreams of becoming a professional singer. There was a small but important impediment. . . . She had never performed and didn’t possess the confidence to try.

But that didn’t stop her from searching. Her transformation took place at one of those high-priced seminars that were rampant a decade ago, the sort of days-long interior journey in a hotel ballroom that either changes your life or makes you resent the friends who roped you in. Howard had the better outcome; she came face-to-face with her fear of performing. And conquered it.

At 30, she became a professional singer.

For the next few years, she kept her day job and sang in clubs around town. Eventually, she became so disillusioned with the business practices of club owners that she gave up performing. This was a personal low point, but fate, Southern California-style, would soon intervene.

One day, said Howard, a schoolteacher friend--someone “who is metaphysical, but not a channeler”--phoned.

“Marcie,” said the teacher, “I don’t know why this is happening, but I was taking a shower this morning and I channeled all this information for you. This voice said, ‘Tell Marcie that she should work with people vocally, to open them up to their spirit, to their possibilities. It is to be a therapeutic process and it is to start happening now.’ ”

Howard’s reaction: “I kinda went, ‘Huh?’ ”

But then she got it.

And in the best metaphysical self-help tradition, Howard decided to start giving seminars of her own.

*

In a dingy rehearsal studio, behind a pet groomer’s studio on Sepulveda Boulevard in West L.A., a band is warming up as a dozen or so people stand around in varying degrees of nervous anticipation.

Howard is running a rehearsal. In a few days, these members of her Woodland Hills-based “Singing from the Inside Out” nightclub workshop will have their culmination, a real performance in a real club with real musicians.

The students are a motley crew: There’s Gabi Payn, a 42-year-old animator and subject of a 1990 documentary about her transformation from male to female. Lori Love, a 40-year-old Encino housewife who looks 25. Joe Green, a sixth-grade teacher with a shaved head and blinding smile. Linda Wolfe, a Simi Valley real estate agent with Nashville aspirations who sings with her construction supervisor husband, Gaylord. Millie Cohen, 72, a great-grandmother who was widowed three years ago and says Howard’s workshops have brought her back to life. And others--a stripper, an art consultant who has survived pancreatic cancer, a marketing consultant for Nestle.

No one is quite so outwardly jangled, however, as Love, who flicks her nails against each other and tugs at the neck of her blouse.

“Am I nervous?” she asks, laughing. “No kidding!”

Love sings Gershwin; a song called “(I’ve Got) Beginner’s Luck.” Her face is frozen, but her voice is surprisingly relaxed.

Afterward, Howard has a suggestion: “Smile! Have a good time with it, Lori. It’s just a little ditty. When you smile, you get rid of that glazed look in your eyes.”

Love gives a smile so brittle she looks as though her face will break.

“I enjoy singing,” she said later, “but I was always too afraid to get up in front of people. I remember when I came home from my first night in Marcie’s class, my husband said, ‘God! You should see the glow in your eyes!’ ”

*

“I call myself a practitioner of vocal awareness,” says Howard, 44. “I believe the voice is a powerful healing instrument, one that we haven’t begun to tap the potential of. I listen to people sing and I hear information about them. I can hear abuse, I can hear grief, I can hear if they are in a good place in their lives.”

Indeed, Linda Wolfe was surprised when Howard pulled her aside after her second class.

“I had a fear of opening my mouth to sing, and she knew that I had been sexually abused,” says Wolfe. “She flat knew! I almost fell over. . . . But she makes you deal with it, and she makes you see it’s OK, that nobody’s going to hurt you.”

That, said Howard, is not atypical.

“I get professionals who are shut down, and who sing in the shower and on the freeway, people who have been called tone deaf all their lives. If they let go and trust me enough, they will be able to match 95% of the tones.”

Sometimes, said Howard, she has students so afraid to sing that they open their mouths and nothing comes out, or they ask the class to face the other way, or, rarely, a student will go into the closet and sing.

“I don’t make anyone do anything,” said Howard. “You move at your own speed. And if you choose not to sing, you don’t have to.”

*

Three days later, the performance is for real. The students have managed to fill a Brentwood nightclub to overflow capacity with 300 family members and friends. The Wolfes have sold 79 $12 tickets. Joe Green has brought in 25 people, including his principal. Lori Love, who manages to look almost relaxed on stage, has a large contingent too--”my brother, my kids and all the Brownie moms!”

The program is as varied as the performers: Broadway, country, rock, rhythm and blues.

In an evening filled with touching and mainly on-key performances, the most electrifying moment belongs to Gabi Payn, who performs “I Can’t Help It” an original, biographical tune: “I don’t mean to cause you unnecessary stress / If you don’t like the way I live my life / Just don’t ask me to be your wife! “

The crowd roars approval.

Marcie Howard stands in the back of the room, beaming.

For someone who believes in the transformative power of song, no moment could be sweeter.