Her Story

The Project

I ask her about this album, why she decided to do a solo project finally, when people had been asking for one for so long.

She shrugs and says, “Well, things change, you know? After I got BC (breast cancer), I found this online group, www.bcsupport.org, and they really helped me. I made a few friends there. Some of them I was pretty tight with."

"Seems crazy, doesn’t it? Getting that close to people you don’t see that often? But it does happen. The times are changing, I guess.” She smiles wryly. “I met some really great gals there, really great. One of them, Gerri Collins, she was a nurse. She was always after me to go back to school. She didn’t know I was a musician for a long time because I don’t talk about it much online.” She laughs, then sighs.

“She thought I’d make a good nurse. She encouraged me to go back to school, which I did. Because of her, really. By then, though, she’d heard me sing. She couldn’t figure out why I’d want to do anything else.” She shakes her head. “She and another friend of mine, Brenda Roots, they both died of breast cancer. And I’d known several others on the site who passed away too. I think that’s what probably did it."

"I was kickin’ the idea around of doing something as a solo artist but I just couldn’t think of anything to say. I think that’s important for a songwriter/singer…..you really have to have something to say that forces you out in the open, no hiding.” She stops for moment, staring off. “I miss them. Like nobody’s business, I miss those girls. They woke me right up, you know?"

"I started noticing that people were dying. Lots were getting better, lots. But hearing what they were saying, what they were really saying about it, things they weren’t telling their families, well........."

"I noticed that there’s a definite dialogue problem between the dying and the living, the ill and the healthy. There’s a gap there; the healthy don’t seem to want to reach out to them, or maybe they don’t know what to say to them, or whatever. The ill don’t want to worry anyone. It’s like in that movie, Cool Hand Luke, where that guy says in that fake accent, ‘What WE-ah have HE-yah is a FAYL-yuh ta ca-MOON-I-CATE.’” She chuckles.

So she began an odyssey of writing, co-writing, producing and performing on a CD that she hoped would return her friends' favor, she says. She found a couple of other writers, Millie Glaser and Rhonda Stamm, both breast cancer survivors in the same support group online. They volunteered their efforts as well.

“Wake them up, that’s what I wanted people to do,” Nita says. “We have to wake up. Look at us…..how many times have you walked behind somebody and they just stop? Stop dead, right in front of you? They’re blocking traffic but they don’t even notice! It’s like they’re so caught up in their internal business that they don’t realize they’re forcing everyone to go out of their way for them.”

She shakes her head. “We can learn a lot from these women, these women with breast cancer. A lot about slowing down, listening to ourselves, telling the truth to ourselves about what we really want, who we really want to be, how we want to behave. Listening to each other."

"This whole “me, me, me” isn’t as important as ‘what can I do today that will make a difference?’ People like to feel like what they’re doing is important but it’s like they’ve forgotten how to do that, all while they’re running around thinking that getting there is the important thing," she continues.

"It’s just such a rush….a rush to get to work, to get that deadline, to get home, getting mad at that guy who cut us off in traffic or that person who’s maybe a little slow in the checkout lane. Where we all goin’? It’s all gonna come to an end somewhere. For all of us. Is that what we want to remember? That we rushed through it and missed all the important stuff? I started getting a little mad about it.” She sighs, a little frustrated. “We should be smarter than this, you know?”

She began the long process of plastic surgery to rebuild her chest. She’d had a second mastectomy in 2001 after too many poorly defined but suspicious scans.