Page 9 - ABILITY Magazine - Best Practices Employment

inappropriate to act like a fan. Plus he had such a huge entourage. He can be hard to get to.
A friend of mine who went to the Perkins School for the Blind toured with Stevie Wonder for quite a while. He even sounds like Stevie. So Lia, you’re an opera singer?
Lia Martirosyan: That’s what they tell me.
LaBreck: How long have you been singing?
Martirosyan: I’m classically trained, and I’ve been doing it for the past five years, which is still a relatively short time for the genre. Definitely a lovely journey.
Cooper: Last year when we attended the WWW (World Wide Web) and W4A (Web for All) conferences in South Korea, they invited Lia to sing in 2015. It will be in Flo- rence, Italy.
LaBreck: That’s wonderful.
Martirosyan: Indeed.
Russell LaBreck: Have you been there before?
Martirosyan: No, and I’m going to bring my stretchy pants. (laughter)
LaBreck: So you can eat all day.
Martirosyan: Exactly.
Cooper: Tell me more about your educational background.
LaBreck: I went to public school first, but when I start- ed losing my vision, they decided that I would get a bet- ter education if I went to Perkins School for the Blind. And I got an absolutely wonderful education. I was also musically inclined, and started singing at Perkins. Bev- erly Sills, the late opera singer, invited me to New York. I went for a visit, and then she wanted my parents to hand me over to her to train, and my mother was like,
“Are you kidding me? There is no way!” So I continued to train, but not under her.
Martirosyan: Too bad.
LaBreck: I know. But I still had my glory days with singing and I loved it. The first time I ever went to an opera, Beverly Sills took me. It was in New York, and it was fantastic.
Martirosyan: Which opera?
LaBreck: I don’t even remember. It was at the Met. It might have been Aida. And it was a totally different world, totally foreign to me, and very interesting. So I have a great appreciation for opera and opera singers; it’s a difficult craft to master.
Martirosyan: Do you still belt out some notes around the house every now and again?
Russell: I try to get her to sing, and she will not do it. I don’t know why; I gave up trying a long time ago.
LaBreck: I was never meant to be a public singer. I did it at school because it was fun, but that was it.
Russell: When we met many years ago, there was a soul band similar to the Temptations. And one of them heard her sing, and wanted her to join. We had some talks around it, but she totally convinced me that that wasn’t the route she wanted to take. She really wanted to work in the disability field. We started to get more serious about our relationship. I said to her, “Look, that’s not my world, but if you want to go off and do your thing, I’ll support you.” It was funny how we had that conver- sation. It almost scared me. I was thinking Whitney Houston.
LaBreck: No, no, not even close.
Cooper: Janet, when did you start to lose your vision?
LaBreck: It probably started going early on in my child-
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