Pure

Hayley Westenra, album cover, Odyssey

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Hayley Westenra, now 22, was an international star at 16

I, Fanny

I, Fanny McElroy, turned Sister Alma Rose on to Hayley Westenra, now 22, when she became known as a singing phenomenon at age 16 (Hayley Westenra, not Sister Alma Rose). She (Hayley) just gets better every year, as her voice develops and settles down. Because we love you, and because it will technically be Christmas until Twelfth Night, we are including two Christmas videos of Hayley, the first performed with the Choirboys.

Here is a little bio of Hayley from Wikipedia. I could rewrite it, draw from a few other sources, and make it “original,” but… why would I want to do that when Wikipedia does… well, an adequate job all on its own?

Here is Hayley with the Choirboys in selections from the musical OLIVER

Hayley Dee Westenra is a New Zealand soprano, songwriter and UNICEF Ambassador. Her first internationally released album, Pure, reached #1 on the UK classical charts in 2003 and has sold more than two million copies worldwide. Pure is the fastest-selling international début classical album to date, having made Westenra an international star at age 16. In August 2006, she joined the Irish group Celtic Woman, was featured on their Celtic Woman: A New Journey CD and DVD, toured with them on their 2007 Spring Tour, and also was featured on their latest DVD, The Greatest Journey: Essential Collection, released in 2008. She sings… in a number of languages.

Westenra has performed for dignitaries around the world. She is the youngest UNICEF Ambassador to date and has contributed to charities around the world.

Okay, the next video is Hayley singing “Away in a Manger” with the choir and congregation at Manchester Cathedral. (Get this: “Work on the current building [Manchester Cathedral] began in 1215.” That might make it older than Sister Alma Rose.)

Hayley looks beautiful in her clingy pink dress. I could not wear that dress. One, I don’t have the bazooms to fill it out, and, two, I couldn’t hold my stomach in and sing at the same time. I wonder if the people who “manage” her make her eat celery and plain yogurt and spend two hours a day with a personal trainer. That would be very disillusioning.

Omigosh, my brother is screaming bloody murder, got to go, I’ll be back ASAP….

Sister Alma Rose makes everything okay

I am (obviously) back. Johannes and Daddy were having a game of catch, and Johannes was pretending he was Tim Lincecum and he (Johannes) dislocated his shoulder. Sister Alma Rose got there, to where they were playing catch on the other side of the barn, before I did, which, I don’t know how she does that.

By the time I got there, in fact, she had “relocated” Johannes’s shoulder, which, I certainly do not know how she does that, and she is muttering prayers the whole time, and she says Jesus and Mary a lot, and I’d swear I heard her say Allah, which would be okay, I guess, because, as Sister Alma Rose has taught me practically since infancy, it is “impossible to circumscribe God with a name.” I bet I was the only toddler in Hilltop who regularly used the word circumscribe in conversation.

Judy Garland in TILL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY, 1946

In any case, Sister Alma Rose says that she is a healer, that healing is one of the reasons she’s here, alive, on earth, and that it gives her great joy and confers benefits upon others. Some of what I just said are her own words, but I’m not sure which ones… “confers benefits,” for sure.

Hayley Westenra, too, has found a purpose that brings her happiness and that blesses others, Sister Alma Rose says, and we have talked about how easily a person so beautiful and talented can become a commodity, continually manipulated by family members, agents, et cetera, made to perform too much, treated as a money machine, and so forth, such as happened to Judy Garland and ruined her health.

Shed a little light

By the way, Sister Alma Rose does not like it when I say that I “turned her on to” Hayley Westenra,” because, she says, that expression came out of the drug culture, which is one of the few things that makes her really angry, illicit drugs, I mean, and she’s told me gruesome stories about people who shoot up with “jellies,” a liquid form of temazepam, and end up having to have a leg amputated because all the injection sites get inflamed, and one guy, I think in Scotland, died when he tried to inject temazepam into his eyeball. True story.

Well, anyway, I think that the thing that would bring me the most joy and would also benefit others (I’m not sure precisely how, let me get back to you) would be for me to be a backup singer for James Taylor, but by the time I’m old enough, he’ll be, like, 70, and it’s entirely possible that he will not be touring or even giving very many concerts, but I do so much want to be one of those people who harmonize with James on

James Taylor 1999 (photo: Evan Osherow via Flickr). Okay, is it just me, or is there a disembodied hand on James Taylor's shoulder?

Let us turn our thoughts today
To Martin Luther King
And recognize that there are ties between us
All men and women
Living on the earth
Ties of hope and love
Sister and brotherhood
That we are bound together
In our desire to see the world become
A place in which our children
Can grow free and strong
We are bound together
By the task that stands before us
And the road that lies ahead
We are bound and we are bound…

…and then get to do a little bopping and swaying on the “shed a little light” part. Father Dooley says, with respect to my dancing, that I am a “pretty hip little sister.” Of course, Father Dooley is a priest; what could he possibly know about hip?

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See various Hayley Westenra videos, along with Enya and Loreena McKennitt, at http://www.zgravweb.net/51med_mix.html

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