The Willow Glen Resident

Photograph by Skye Dunlap

The Entertainer: Miriam Rowan loves to amuse her fellow music students with her Victor Borge-inspired routine of music and jokes.

Glen senior entertains with musical one-liners

By Rebecca Wallace

Attired in a navy blue pantsuit with matching pumps, her legs neatly crossed, Miriam Rowan, 76, is every inch the lady.

Then she slides a gleaming gold French horn onto her lap and strikes up a round of "Frere Jacques," one hand playing one part on the horn, the other accompanying herself on the piano.

"The French horn is a beautiful instrument but very hard to play," she says perkily when the round is finished, her earlier shyness gone. "But if you can't play it, hang it on the wall. It makes a nice Christmas decoration."

You can't help but smile. This is one entertaining lady.

Rowan's serene face and calm manner are a bit deceptive; she's more active than many people half her age. Besides playing the French horn in the San Jose Wind Symphony and singing second soprano in the choir at the Stone Church of Willow Glen, she plays the organ and a bit of trumpet and is teaching her granddaughter to play the piano.

She stays in shape by hiking and walking--including hiking through the Austrian and Swiss Alps last summer. And, of course, there's her Victor Borge-inspired comedy routine with the French horn and piano.

Rowan titters when the Goofy sticker on her French horn case is pointed out. "I inherited it with the case," she says, "but it's sort of fitting."

After seeing Borge perform, Rowan was inspired to put together her own routine, in which she plays the horn and piano simultaneously, with one-liners interspersed between songs.

"Even though it's a French horn, I play it in English," jokes Rowan, hoisting the horn in her Willow Glen home. Putting her hand in the bell of the horn to play it, she adds, "There's 12 feet of tubing in here. If you don't hold your hand in, it could all unravel."

While taking music classes at San Jose City College, she helped relieve the stress of students before finals with her routines. "It's been enormously fun for me to do this," she says. "I just love to hear people laugh."

Jan Turnage, business manager for the 60-member San Jose Wind Symphony, says warmly of Rowan, "She's such a quiet little person, and when she does this piano thing, another person emerges."

Turnage also expressed admiration for Rowan's gusto during the symphony's trip to Europe last July, when the group performed with the World Association for Symphonic Band Ensembles in Schladming, Austria, and Davos, Switzerland.

Despite breaking her hand shortly before the trip, Rowan "was helping some of the other members up and down the Alps," Turnage said. "She's not the kind just to sit back."

In Switzerland, the symphony played for a tourist association--including one number with a band from San Diego.

"We went into the balcony at the end of their concert and we all played 'Stars and Stripes Forever,' with us in the balcony and them on the stage," Rowan recalls. "It was a strange thing to have our whole band assembled over there in Switzerland with all our big instruments--almost by magic."

Rowan says music has always been important to her--she started playing by ear at the age of 5. After earning a degree in music from the University of Washington in 1942, she concentrated on being a wife and mother until she began taking music classes at San Jose City College about seven years ago.

Recently she's been taking private piano lessons. "It had been so long since taking lessons. I really wanted to grow some more," she says. "I have appreciated the focus that music has given my life."

She smiles widely. "I still need direction and focus in my life--even though I am 76 years old."

The San Jose Wind Symphony's next concert is a joint concert May 1 with the Los Gatos High School Symphonic Band. For more information, call 927-7597.

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