Honoring the Dream: Terrified and Forging Ahead Anyway

Hello, and welcome to Boomer Banter, where we have real talk about aging well. I am your host, Wendy Green.

And before Boomer Banter became what it is today, before hundreds of conversations about purpose and reinvention, caregiving, relationships, identity and aging well, there was this conversation. This interview originally aired as episode 16.

She's the kind of person who spent her life doing everything right, and then in midlife, she decided to do something wildly outside of her comfort zone. Shelley became a cabaret singer, and not only that, she taught herself Portuguese and performed Brazilian music in Rio de Janeiro.

But listening back now, what strikes me most isn't the performance. It's the deeper message underneath it.

This conversation is really about what happens when we stop dismissing our dreams as impractical, when we stop waiting to feel qualified, and when we finally realize that time matters. I also hear something else now that I probably didn't fully understand back then.

That reinvention begins with discomfort or health scare or job loss or restlessness or the quiet realization that life is moving faster than we expected. So today, nearly 280 episodes later, I wanted to bring this conversation back to you because I think Shelley's message may matter even more now.

And it did then. I hope you enjoy this look back into the early days of Boomer Banter.

Hi, Shelley.

Welcome to Boomer Banter.

Hello, Wendy. Thanks for having me on the show.

I'm very excited about hearing all about your life and the double life that you lead. So maybe if you can just start us off a little bit with what.

You do during the day as part.

Of being an attorney or a consultant to an attorney.

Yeah, sure. Well, as you indicated in my introduction, most of my life, I've done sensible things.

What we're going to talk about is something a bit more frivolous that I decided to have a go at. Yeah, I was a lawyer for about 17 years. Altogether, I was a commercial litigation lawyer, dealing with business disputes of all kinds.

I was both a solicitor and a barrister. That means I did the office work and the court work as well. Very stressful, long hours. After I had my family, that became more difficult to do.

And so I decided to branch out into some other areas and activities. So in my consulting practice, I help lawyers to achieve their business and career aspirations.

I help lawyers with law firms with recruitment and individual lawyers with career advice and career mentoring. I also do training. I've got a marketing degree as well as law, so I provide training for lawyers to help them promote their practices.

And I also help lawyers buy and sell legal practices. And as well as that, I'm a teacher. I teach people how to be lawyers.

So I'm a lecturer in the practical training course for law graduates that they need to do here in Australia before they get admitted as legal practitioners.

Wow. So that all does sound like a very detail, maybe somewhat dry, very rigid kind of work that you would have to do in a legal profession.

And like you said, very stressful. So how do you segue that into suddenly you're a cabaret singer?

I agree, it's an unlikely progression.

Look, in my mid-40s barrister friend of mine gave me a bit of a shove, got me into singing in rock bands, and when he first suggested it, I said, don't be ridiculous, I'm not a rock singer. He said, come along on Sunday, we're having a jam, just come and watch. For some reason I went along and he,

He rigged it so that I was called up to sing in the first group to sing backing vocals, and he tricked me. But when I got up there and the drums started and the guitars started, I thought, where has this been all my life? I just loved it.

And from then on, I went forwards with that. Look, it was amateur standard, you know, you're singing with garage bands. It was a heck of a lot of fun.

Didn't do it all that often, you know, once every few months we'd have a bit of a gig. But that's how I got back into singing, because I had been singing in a choir at school.

That was decades earlier, of course, it was a very serious and disciplined choir. And when I finished school, I was, you know, I really had it with all that discipline and I didn't sing again for decades.

So it was my lawyer friend who got me back into music.

So you said once you got up on the stage and you heard the music and the drums and, you know, you just felt it right away.

It went right through me.

Was there some nervousness? Some like, oh, my gosh, I'm going to embarrass myself up here.

Of course, I don't know what made me go, oh, I was. I was terrified. But at the same time, I wanted to give it a go. And it was so challenging.

The need to hit the notes and remember the lyrics terrify well,

So how do you do that? Shelley, you are an attorney by schooling and profession.

You have to have every T crossed and every I dotted before you go and present a case in the courthouse. You can't make a mistake or your client loses. How did you deal with this?

Getting up on stage after not singing all those years and maybe missing a lyric or missing a note?

Every time I made a mistake, I felt just mortified, so embarrassed. Every time. You know, when you study law, you don't memorise stuff. All the exams are open book. You take your notes in with you.

And of course, when you go to court, you've got notes. You don't carry everything in your head. You don't prepare your script.

In fact, it's a mistake to prepare your script because then you're not flexible. You need to listen and react in real time and alter the next question accordingly. A drill down into what the witness is saying.

So I had not had any practice, really, at memorizing things, and suddenly I had to memorize all these lyrics. So that was a new skill that I had to learn.

The other thing is, as you indicated in court, you have to be very careful about what comes out of your mouth, because what comes out matters.

You can withdraw it, but it's not quite the same as keeping it in in the first place, you know, Whereas on stage, you need to be a lot more spontaneous. And, yes, spontaneity was not my middle name, I have to say.

So for someone like you, who, you.

Know, you teach, you guide, I mean,.

You know, being perfect in some ways is probably an important part of your professional life. And as women, a lot of us have been taught along the way, you know, you have to be better than these others to be accepted as a professional.

I mean, how did. How did you deal with your, you.

Know, this mindset of I have to be perfect?

Yeah, it's an interesting concept, isn't it? Because intellectually we know none of us are perfect.

But I think that when you're growing up, if you are conscientious and you generally do well, then an expectation develops in yourself and in others around you that you're going to do well. And if you mess up, it becomes very embarrassing. You almost feel ashamed about it.

I think my generation was the first large cohort coming into the profession. And so there was very much an aspect of. You had to prove yourself to the men and you almost had to work harder than the men.

And you could say, do better, but what's that? But you certainly. You were needing to prove yourself.

Yeah. So this was probably a very healthy avenue to go out and look at music and say, well, okay, I'm going to be spontaneous, I'm going to be crazy.

Maybe I don't have perfect.

Yeah. And I'd never done anything really on stage. I'd shied away from things like acting and the past because I thought I'd feel so embarrassed.

And now there I was in a rock band with everybody looking at me. Yes, I did that for maybe three years, on and off. Every few months we did a gig.

But by that time I was starting to find it difficult to find rock songs, more rock songs that I wanted to sing.

I had about 15 songs in my repertoire, but my range was limiting me and I have quite a deep voice and I was finding it hard to reach the higher notes. And so that put a lot of songs out of reach for me. And I was looking for something else, something more.

And then one day my husband and I were going out to the theater and he dropped me off whilst he parked the car so that I could pick up the tickets. I sauntered along the street and I noticed there was a new place.

The old tobacconist shop had gone and there was this new place and it had velvet curtains in the window and. And there was a poster that caught my eye, this sexy songstress in a red dress with one of those old fashioned metal microphones.

And it asked three questions. Have you been singing in your lounge room? Has it got too small for you? And would you like to sing here in front of a supportive audience?

And I just went, tick, tick, tick, Yes, I have to be there. And when I took my husband after the play to show him this poster, I said, I'm going. And he said, why? He had no idea that I'd be interested in that.

And he was actually a little bit worried in case it was a bit seedy. Yeah, he had this desire to protect me, I think, but I persuaded him to come along with me.

So is that when you started down the road of Brazilian music?

This is when I got into cabaret. It was an open mic night for Cabaret called Cabaret Live.

You came along with sheet music, handed it to the pianist, and your performance was impromptu, no rehearsal. So you can imagine how challenging this was for somebody who liked to be prepared, Made the adrenaline pump, I bet.

After a while I started to bring those Brazilian songs. They were songs that I'd been practicing in my singing lessons because I'd found a singing teacher.

When I started with the rock band, I didn't want to sound like a choir girl in the rock band. And so I found a singing teacher.

I went to the School of Rock Music School because they sponsored the Rock Music association and so they wouldn't think it's strange that this middle aged woman suddenly wanted to sing in rock bands. So I'd been having some singing lessons and I'd discovered these Brazilian songs. The one that you'd probably know would be the girl from Ipanema.

That's the most famous. Antonio Carlos Jobim. Tall and tan and young and lovely the girl from Ipanema goes walking and when she passes each one she passes goes ah.

I mean, just about everybody's heard that song, even if just in an elevator. And that composer wrote so many beautiful songs. And yes, I started to bring those songs along to Cabaret Live and give them a go.

Well, then you did more than that. You decided to go to Brazil and perform.

Yeah. Yes. Shortly after I started at Cabaret Live, I went with my husband to the Diana Crowell concert in the Barossa Valley.

Diana Crowell, beautiful jazz pianist and songstress. And there I bought the DVD of Diana Crowell's concert in Rio.

And the next weekend I snapped open the box and put the disc in the machine, settled back on the couch to watch Diana performed her repertoire of jazz standards. And yeah, it was in a theater that was like La Boheme, where I did cabaret live, but on a much bigger scale.

Little round tables, cocktails, candles, muted lighting. And then Diana started singing in Brazilian Portuguese. And by the time she reached the end of the fourth line, the whole place erupted.

People were cheering wildly and the roof just about lifted off because she was singing in their language and they were loving it. And at that moment I sat upright on the couch and I said to myself, I want what she's having.

I wanted to sing their music in their language, in their country. I wanted my own concert in Rio.

And then I did a reality check, because I had never been to Brazil, I didn't know anybody there, I didn't speak the language, I was hardly even a singer. At Cabaret Live, I was accruing stage time at the rate of three minutes per month. So I was dreaming.

It was just a crazy, stupid idea and I immediately dismissed it.

But I have a recording, Shelley, that Shows that you actually made it on stage in Brazil. So I would like to show that and then let you talk about how that happened.

Okay.

For us.

So let me go there. Here we go.

Tall and tan and young and lovely the girl from Ipanema goes walking and when she passes each one she passes.

Through goes.

When she walks it's like a samba that swings so cool and sways so gently that when she passes each one she passes goes.

All right.

That was amazing.

How fun. It really was. Yes.

And you were singing in Portuguese.

Oh, yes, yes.

So, okay, so you got to tell us the story of how you learned Portuguese, how you ended up in Brazil on the stage with Brazilian musicians. I want the story.

All right.

Well, I continued taking my music, including the Brazilian songs, to cabaret live once a month. And every now and then, I thought about my vision of performing in Brazil. But I had no idea how to do that, and I thought it was just a silly dream.

Well, about three years later, something happened to propel me. I started to feel there's something weird going on with my heart. It was racing, and sometimes it felt like it missed a beat.

And when I had medical investigations, I discovered that I had a leaking mitral valve.

Now, the valve controls the flow of blood through the heart, and if it's allowed to flow back the wrong way, the heart swells and, well, eventually you die. And so I. I needed to have open heart surgery.

And when I went to my surgeon to visit, to meet my surgeon, he leaned across the desk to me and he said, I must inform you of the risks of this operation. There are the three main risks. Three big ones are heart attack, stroke, and death.

No, this was the risk of the surgery.

Yes. Yes. So, well, no. I brought out my diary and said, what date shall we do it? What choice did I have? Without the surgery, I'd die anyway.

When I came out of the operation and realized I was alive, it began to dawn on me. I've got a second chance at this. And it takes a long time to recover from open heart surgery. Three months, which gave me a lot of time to think.

And I began to think, well, if I'm going to live, I'm going to really live. I should do the things that I want to do. And I think, Wendy, when we. When we.

Now that we boomers are reaching the age that we are, we start to realize we're not here forever. You know, this is not forever. What we have is now. And we should be using the time in the best way we can and not squandering our time.

So I thought, I'm going to have my concert in Rio. I'm going to work out how to do it. And, you know, when I used to work as a lawyer, I used to react and respond to things that came across my desk.

People would bring me problems, and I would sort them out and deal with them. But now I began to imagine and initiate and try to make something new happen.

You know, a lot of industries are more creative than, say, law, where you make something and they create a market for it. Whereas I was used to just responding to what happened around me. Now I began to initiate something for myself.

I thought about what would I need, what would be the elements of this challenge? Well, I would need some, Some musicians to accompany me. I'd need a venue, and I'd need an audience. And I decided to start with musicians.

And being the very sensible and conservative person that I am, I went straight to Facebook and I discovered that I was connected with a Brazilian musician. I contacted him and I said, I'd like to have a concert in Rio de Janeiro. Would you like to accompany me?

You just came right out with that first question, oh, my gosh. And a second chance changed you.

I waited for a response, and the message came, and he said no. He said no because he didn't play the songs that I had mentioned or the. The composers that I had mentioned.

He played the songs of other composers, which I didn't sing. So we didn't seem to have a match there. He said, but I have a friend who would be perfect for you.

This is like the six degrees of separation, isn't it?

Yeah.

Somebody you know, Somebody knows somebody. And this is how social media works. He said, his name is Anais Rush. Why don't you have a look at his videos on YouTube and connect with him?

I'm sure he'd be perfect for you. So I had a look at his videos on YouTube. There were about two of them. Neither of them were bossa nova. They were his own compositions.

But he seemed to play guitar quite well, and he had a nice voice. So I messaged him in the same sort of way. His response came back straight away, yes, of course, I would love to accompany you in a concert in Rio.

He didn't live in Rio de Janeiro. He lived in a small town far to the south. And I didn't really know how to make this project progress.

You know, I thought about the risks, the logistics. Suppose I was able to set up a concert in Rio. Supposing this guy turned up and we didn't get along or the music wasn't any good.

Supposing he didn't even show up. Supposing he wasn't even who he said he was. I was going to have egg all over my face and it was going to be expensive egg.

So I thought, well, what can I do? How do I make this project go, go forward? Well, I decided to. I did some creative thinking.

You know, I could have taken a musician from Australia with me, but the musicians that I knew, they were very busy and I thought it would be very hard to find a time when they'd be able to come with me.

And I also quite liked the idea of a cross cultural experience of working with somebody who was authentic, authentically Brazilian, and it was their country. I decided to invite my new Facebook friend to come to Adelaide, Australia, to rehearse with me and see if we get along.

No, test it out, see if we get along and we could do a show here. And he said, yes, I'd love to come to Australia, but that was smart.

It kind of removed some of the risk of you going there and him.

Not showing up or whatever.

Yes, hear that? And I thought, well, this is a discrete project in itself. If it goes well, we can take it further. If not, well, there's not much lost.

So I did arrange for him to come to Australia. We had, well, a bit of a glitch, really. I discovered. I set everything up. I set up a show in the Adelaide French Festival.

Venues, hotels, flights, had everything organized. And then I discovered that he needed a special visa in order to perform in Australia. He could not perform publicly without this special visa.

And it took a minimum of three months. I learned to obtain it. And so there was really no way that we could get this visa in time.

So the posters arrived, I opened the box and trashed the lot. I cancelled the venues, the airfares, the hotel, and started again for the following year. It took nine months to get the visa.

It's a very complex process, particularly with a language barrier. And you asked me about learning Brazilian Portuguese.

You know, the funny thing about this project was once I was committed to it, all kinds of coincidences occurred to help me reach my goal. Now I found people to help me with the music and with the language.

I found a language school five minutes from my home, the Brazilian Ethnic School of South Australia. It was newly established. I saw an article in the newspaper and phoned up the director to organize to go for classes.

So, yeah, I started going to lessons on Saturday mornings. And by the time my Brazilian friend arrived. We finally did get his visa. You know, people later said, I never thought you'd get it.

Didn't believe you'd get the visa. And I had. I had never done any visa work either.

I did that all myself because I thought, you know, it's just so hard with the language, the language barrier. So, yeah, by the time my Brazilian friend arrived, I had been learning for about 12 months. I was not conversational.

There's only so much you can learn on Saturday mornings in the space of a year. Can you imagine how I was at the airport the night he was arriving? How excited and nervous I felt? Did he get on the plane?

Did he think it was just a hoax? What would he be like? Would we get along? What would the music be like?

And I waited for about an hour and a half at the airport until a man came out with a fedora hat on his head and a guitar on his back. And I recognized him straight away. And I ran towards him with my sign with his name on it. I took him to the car park with his gear.

We put his luggage in the back. And he tried to climb into the driver's seat of my car.

Other side of a strap. So I got into the car, and as we drove away towards the city, I realized, I have to speak. We can't sit here in silence. I have to speak.

I'm going to mess up big time because I've only been learning for a year. But it's better to make mistakes than it is to drive in silence. Well, he didn't seem to be too worried at all.

He just spoke in Portuguese and assumed that I would understand. He spoke no English.

Oh, no.

But look, we found a shared vocabulary. We managed to rehearse. We got to know each other. My proficiency in the language increased immensely in the 10 days that he was here.

We did our two shows in the festival. They went really well.

And the net result of all of that was that he invited me to come back, come to Brazil to perform in his town, Jaragua du Sul. And I thought, that's a really sensible next step, because we'll consolidate our musical partnership and we'll get to know each other better.

And, yeah, that's a really good next step in our. In our partnership. So that's what we did. My husband and I went to Brazil. This was our reconnoiter trip.

He found a conference that he could attend in Recife, in the north. And on that visit also, we went to Rio de Janeiro because we needed to find a venue.

Okay.

And a musician friend here had a friend in Rio de Janeiro who ran a bar, a music bar. So we organized to go there. We managed to get tickets. We went there on the Saturday night.

I'd sent a showreel to this guy by email and managed to speak to the guy during the break and he said, oh, haven't we responded to you yet? I'm really sorry, it's just been crazy. It's just been so busy. Yeah, sure, we'll put you on the program. No problems, so easy as that. No problem.

And as we departed, he said, yes, look, send me an email, we'll set it up. Got back to Australia and emailed him to work out a date for the show. And I didn't hear back straight away, so I emailed again.

He must have been so, so busy. So I phoned and I was told, look, the best time to speak to him is 11am on a Saturday. That equates to about midnight on Saturday night.

Did I feel like phoning Brazil at midnight on Saturday? Really not. But I made the call, spoke to the guy and he said, oh, sorry, I've just been so busy. Yeah, look, email me at my private email address.

And he took it down. So I emailed him. Still nothing. Kept checking, has it gone to spam?

This went on and obviously the guy says yes, but he means no for some reason we're not what he's looking for, or for whatever reason he's not responding. And having thought we had a venue and a deal, I was back to square one. Yeah, so the result of the trip to Rio was just zero.

So had to do some more research to find other possible places. Emailed those places, still no response. And ultimately my Brazilian friend Anais said, look, I have a friend Mara who works in the theater.

And I had met Mara and I thought she's pretty sensible. He said, how about we get Mara to follow up your inquiries? And I thought, that makes a lot of sense. She can act as our agent.

That was the place that booked us to perform. Wow. We performed a two hour show there.

Oh my gosh, Shelley, that's so exciting.

Can you imagine the moment that I stepped on the stage where my music idols had performed, including Antonio Carlos Jobim, the composer of the Girl from Ipanema, Astrid, Gilberto, Joo Gilberta, Marcus Valli, Sergio Mendez, all the greats performed there.

So you have certainly come from react and respond to Imagine and initiate. Wow. Anybody who knows you now is going to know that if you put your mind to something, you're going to make it happen.

Well, I think anyone can. I reckon the key is to commit, because once you're committed, you'll find a way.

That's amazing. I mean, I think that would be an amazing takeaway from what we're talking about today.

But I wonder if there's anything else besides the idea that I think anyone can do what they commit to and what they dream about. But is there another takeaway besides that amazing takeaway?

I think an important thing is to have the dream and to honor the dream, not dismiss the dream. You know, I think everyone at least once in their life should do something to amaze themselves.

You know, take that step outside your comfort zone, whatever it is for you. You know, I have friends who run marathons and climb mountains, and that's not for me. Music was my thing.

But whatever it is, whatever your thing is, take that step and be bold.

But you have certainly inspired me. It's such a great story.

And yes, maybe it was a second chance, but I think inside of you, too, there's this belief in yourself and this desire to live your life, which is a great example for everybody that's been around you, I'm sure.

Listening back to this conversation all these years later. I do hear it differently now. At the time, I think I heard Shelley's story mostly as inspiration. Oh, my gosh.

This woman was chasing an impossible dream and making it happen. But now I hear something deeper. I hear a woman giving herself permission to become more than one thing.

She was a lawyer and an artist, disciplined and spontaneous, a person who was reactive and responsive. And now she is imaginative and initiates. And honestly, I think many of us spend decades shrinking ourselves into one acceptable identity.

You were a parent or a professional, a caregiver, a helper, a spouse, the reliable one. Then one day we wake up and wonder, is there still another part of me waiting to be explored? That's why I wanted to revisit this episode.

Because aging well is not about staying young. It's about staying awake to possibility. Shelley said something in this episode that I still think about. She said, honor the dream, and not every dream will become the full reality.

As she mentioned in the episode, she said, even if she hadn't made it to Rio. She had so many, So many experiences on the journey.

The journey mattered as part of the dream. But maybe there's something inside you that still wants expression. A voice. Curiosity. A longing. A creative spark. A desire to contribute in a new way.

And maybe the real risk isn't embarrassment or failure. Maybe the real risk is dismissing yourself before you even begin.

So thank you for being part of This journey with me.

Whether you've been here since episode 16.

Or you're brand new to Boomer banter. And if this conversation stirred something with you, I'd love to hear about it. But until next time, keep learning, keep growing.

And keep reminding yourself you are never too old to set a new goal or dream a new dream. Sam.