Originally published on October 4, 2023. Part 2 of a 2 part interview, click here for part 1. 

Her singing career appeared to be a thing of the past, when Kim Paulley came to Cortes Island in 1992. The release of ‘Straight From The Heart’ had been promising, but she turned to Classical music. While there had been ‘fantastic’ moments between 1985-90, there was also the toil of auditions (and sometimes not getting the part). Her career was on hold when a friend  recommended the retreats at Hollyhock, where George Sirk was a naturalist guide.

“He was ever engaging, charming and  I went out on his outings. We became friends. There was an attraction there for sure, too, but I was still married at the time,” Pauley explained.

Then she asked, “George, I want to go swimming at the lake. Can you tell me a good place on the lake to swim where you don’t need a swimsuit?”

“And he said,’ you want to go to the nudie rock? So, great, okay, and he gave me the directions and everything.” 

“Next day, I see him on the deck, and I’m all covered with red spots. ‘The lake itch,’ we used to call it. You don’t hear about it much anymore, but he looked at me and said, ‘Oh no, I sent you to the wrong place and you’ve got the lake itch. Did you dry off really quickly afterwards? That’s what you’re supposed to do.’” 

“I said, well, ‘I didn’t know that part.’” 

“He felt really badly.” 

“I was only there for about four or five days,and only saw him a few more times. We went out on that morning row with a little picnic of muffins and tea, and sat out on Long Tom.”

“The day I was leaving, I just said goodbye to him, and he said, ‘Well, I owe you dinner. I gave you the lake itch, so when I’m in Vancouver sometime maybe we could go for dinner. My mom lives there.’” 

“I said, ‘yeah, but  I am married.’”  

“He said, ‘oh, okay, we’ll see you around.’” 

“A year later David, my husband at the time, had gone off to Arizona to be a production manager with the opera company there. That was  a trial separation. We did try things one more time in Vancouver, but we ended up ultimately splitting up.”

“So by the next summer, I was on my own and I looked George up again.  The call of Cortes was very strong. I absolutely fell in love with the place, as many of us do after we’ve been here the first time, but I also really liked George, too. So I got in touch with him, and he said, ‘well, this is a perfect time to come visit, it’s my birthday.’ It was July 25th, and he said, ‘I’m having a huge party,’ which indeed it was. It was a barbecue. Everybody was all over the ten acres of his property.” 

“That’s when our romance got started.  We spent about a week hanging out together. He’d already told me ‘I do have a girlfriend here on Cortes but  she’s away. We decided that  we can see other people.’ So  I fell in between the cracks there. When I was leaving, he said, ‘you know, I’ve got my girlfriend here.’ So I was like, ‘yeah, great,’  but  I had gone into it eyes wide open.”

“He stayed in touch and by Christmas, he said, ‘I split up with my girlfriend. It didn’t really work out for us, so I’m wondering if you’d like to come for lunch with my mom and I?’”

“Okay, we’ve gone quickly from us not being a couple to me meeting his mother, But I was interested enough that I said, ‘Yeah okay, let’s go for lunch.’” 

“We really became a couple from there on. We officially say our anniversary is Valentine’s Day because that’s when we were really committed.”  

“I was still working, we were having a long distance relationship, but by the following summer, so that would have been summer of 94,  I decided to do a trial move to Cortes. Took a leave from my job, and I stayed.” 

“George was very encouraging for me to sing again and it was great, because I don’t know if I would have started again otherwise.

You have to have that, somebody saying, Yes! Do it! Do it! A cheerleader. An advocate and he was that for sure. He’s always been that for me and it kind of chokes me up a bit.” 

Paulley started singing again when Queen Elizabeth visited the Twin Islands in August 1994.

“We had our big moment there that ended up on the national news across Canada because Bill Weaver filmed it.”

“We got out in the rowboat one morning. I’m sure you’ve heard this story. It’s taken on mythic proportions. Well, it really is true. A bunch of us from Hollyhock went out in the Hollyhock rowboat.”

“I stood on one of the Twin Islands. George figured  the breeze was just right. It was about 7:30 in the morning. The Queen would be up, and her windows would be open. I sang ‘God Save the Queen,’ and Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’ from Porgy and Bess.” 

“It was totally fun, this whole group with us. Bill Weaver out there with his big camera. He said, ‘I’m going to send this to the national news as soon as I get back on Cortes.’ This is like getting it to the ferry and across to Campbell River and then someone from CBC was going to pick it up. They ran it on the national news that night because it was about the Queen.” 

“George’s prediction apparently was true. She did hear me. Ginny Ellingsen was working at the lodge there, I think as a  lady in waiting, and she said, ‘the Queen was touched.’ We took that as a thumbs up. We’d done it.” 

“That got me singing again. I really had shelved it. I started coming up with ideas for concerts and bringing musicians and accompanist to Cortes.”  

“I did my first concert  that fall, 1995, at the Gorge Hall called ‘A Soprano and a Piano.’ We had the lovely grand piano out. May Sherwood promoted the heck out of it, and we had a great turnout. I found an accompanist who lived just on Quadra. We worked up  a great program of art songs  and opera.” 

“It became something that I kept coming back to.”

“Our daughter Charlotte was born  in 1996,  so we were pretty busy with her.” 

“I did manage to do another concert in December 1997 with Simon Kendall, called ‘Songs for Winter’: lots of standard carols, some more obscure carols, and  songs about winter. That was also at the Gorge Hall, and, again, very well received.  Simon’s such an amazing musician. He could play anything on the piano a lot of times just by ear.” 

“Then it was a couple more years, and  I did one with Bruce Hipkin. Bruce was a great pianist and had a jazz combo here on Cortes for a number of years.  He lived in Whaletown with his partner Judy,  who was also a singer. I wanted to do a tribute concert to my mom and so we did a show of mainly show tunes and standards called ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me.’”

“That was 1999, so at that point I was doing a concert every two years.” 

“A year later, a baritone washed up on Cortes, at Hollyhock. It’s always great to have a baritone to do some duets with. Someone from Hollyhock mentioned him to me. They mentioned hearing this guy singing in the shower.”

“We started working on a lot of show tunes again, Broadway. He was a big fan of Sondheim, so we did Sondheim pieces. We each did some solos, like Kurt Weill and other great stuff. Jeff Poufal was the pianist. We gave this lovely concert called ‘Straight from the Heart’ and I do believe I did do a rendition of ‘Straight from the Heart.’ That was in the year 2000.” 

“A couple of years later I met the classical pianist Maria Udovenko at my nephew’s wedding. I brought her back to  Cortes and we did a concert called ‘Sleepless on Cortes.’”

“In 2003, we moved to Victoria as a family, George and Charlotte and I. It was a tough decision. I’d been on Cortes for 10 years at that point and I think for George it was closer to 30, but we felt that it was a great opportunity. I was thinking about doing a Bachelors of Education and formally teaching in the school system with music as a specialty.  George wanted to volunteer with the radio station at UVic. Charlotte was 7 and we thought there were more opportunities for a kid growing up: piano lessons; dance classes and things that she could reliably get into.” 

“I restarted my opera career.” 

“I’d taken up lessons  by telephone with Ken Nielsen, while I was on Cortes.  I was motivated again and started making periodic trips out to Calgary, and studying more with him. I kept hearing him say he might be moving from Calgary to Florida where his son lived. I knew that he was getting on too, and  I wanted to get the last bits.”

“I auditioned for Pacific Opera and right away got into the chorus. The first opera I did with them was ‘Norma,’ and the music is so beautiful – Bellini.  The woman playing ‘Norma,’ Barbara Livingston, was from Campbell River.  This was her  second big role coming into opera in her forties.  And I thought, ‘this is the first opera I’m doing. I’m going to sing with Barbara Livingston.”

“I had a connection to her from the soprano and piano concert that Mary-Ellen Wilkins from Quadra and I did together. We did Cortes, then we went to April Point Lodge on Quadra, and then  we rented a church to give a concert in Campbell River. I would be stretching the truth if I said there were more than ten people that attended in Campbell River. One of them was Barbara Livingston and I think the rest were family.” 

“Barbara Livingston taught singing in Campbell River,  but she was starting to audition for things. She had the biggest, most beautiful voice I’d ever heard.  I later took a couple of opera workshops with her at the Victoria Conservatory. She ended up having quite a short career.” 

“Operas are a feat in themselves, and having the career is a big feat as well, because you’re on the road all the time.” 

“I started up with Pacific Opera, did a whole whack of operas with them, and every year you had to re audition. I still wasn’t very good at auditions. I had  a signature song from Rusalka by Dvorák. It’s in Czech, and it’s, ‘Mesiku na nebi hlubokem.’ ‘Song to the Moon,’ if you want to ever Google it.” 

“I’d been singing with them for about three years, and  the production manager happened to overhear it.  Her name is Isabelle Simoneau and  she suggested me to the artistic team as having a role in Richard Strauss’s Daphne. Her parents, the late Léopold Simoneau (1916-2006) and Pierrette Alarie were opera royalty in Canada. Her father had been a great tenor prior to his death. Her mother, Pierrette Alarie was a great coloratura soprano with huge range, who sang just like a bird. I was absolutely amazed, because I’d been in the chorus for a number of years and then suddenly I  got offered this role. It meant equity pay. I had to join equity and I actually got a decent wage for the whole rehearsal period and the run of the opera which amounts to about six weeks.  I was absolutely thrilled.”

“It was aired on CBC because this opera was not in the standard repertoire. It was an unusual opera  for a regional opera company in Canada to put on. Suddenly I  was on ‘Saturday Afternoon At The Opera.’”

“My thing was always ‘one day I’m going to sing at the Met,’ which is who you usually hear on Saturday Afternoon At The Opera. But there’s a certain portion of the year when the Met’s not in session and they play operas by other opera companies. That’s when they played ‘Daphne.’ Isabelle made that happen.”

 “Her mom, Pierrette Alarie (1921-2011), wanted to meet me  and  tell me how much she loved my singing. It was a beautiful moment for me. Her mom was so sweet. She was barely five feet tall, and died within a year of that, so I felt quite fortunate to squeeze that in somehow wit.” 

“These were high points of living in Victoria. At that point, I’d obtained my Bachelor of Education and was a teacher in the school system. Music was my specialty. That was the bread and butter for us living in Victoria. We had a wonderful character house that we were renovating.  We stayed in Victoria for 13 years.” 

“I worked with the Gilbert and Sullivan Society. I got to do the role in the Mikado, Yum Yum – that was another real high point for me.  I am the proverbial late bloomer.” 

A wonderful tenor named Isaiah Bell, who is also a composer and wrote his  first opera when I was in Victoria,  ‘Oholibah and her Lovers.’  He phoned me and said, ‘I’d really like you to sing in this opera. I have a role that is just perfect for you.’  I was able to do that, which was another real high point for me.” 

“Also, going off to Calgary and performing Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s ‘Stabat Mater,’ which is an absolutely gorgeous piece for two women and the Blue Arch Strings (Elisa Sereno-Janz, conductor). We sang it in this magnificent church with the most gorgeous acoustics. There’s about twelve pieces in it and it goes back and forth between duets between the two sopranos, mezzo and soprano. I had the higher part. Then we each have our own solos and backed up by this great string orchestra”.

“Being there in Victoria, even though I was teaching  full time,  I could really continue dabbling in music  and keep the thread going.  At the Victoria Conservatory  they were running these wonderful programs for singers that wanted to really focus  on a certain genre within the art songs.

In 2016, right before we moved back to Cortes, I did their program of Schubert, and his Winterreise Cycle.”  

“I sang two pieces at the Conservatory. We worked at these pieces slowly, and had vocal coaching. Pianists were part of it as well, so we had accompanists built into it. This is often a hard thing in classical music, hiring an accompanist, hiring a vocal coach, having all the right clothes to wear to the auditions, etc.”

“It’s a very conservative business, although I do think it’s changing somewhat. You still have to pay your accompanist. Singers pretty much never get paid, unless you finally make it or you’re with a professional company. Then they have to pay you equity. But the orchestra, oh my god, that’s one of the most expensive parts of putting on an opera. You’ve got to pay that whole orchestra. They are to the minute, they are unionized, and they should be, but they’re very, very expensive.” 

“I felt fortunate to have a program at the Conservatory where we had accompanists built into it and we could work slowly on pieces and really break them down because a lot of  the music in the classical repertoire is not in English. You’re working with a language coach, with the German for the Schubert, et cetera,  French, Czech, Italian. You have to work on those languages and understand what you’re singing about, but also pronounce it as correctly as you can.”

”That was great for me to have that opportunity and once we moved back to Cortes in 2016,  I kept track of things that were going on at the Conservatory.”

“The next thing I did with them was in 2019, I was in their Mahler project and sang some magnificent music. 

“Margaret McLynn was one of the accompanists. I brought her here to do the Blue Hour,  in 2017 at the Gorge Hall. Margaret was behind the piano, Aaron Ellingson played violin on some pieces and we had a sold out house there, full to the rafters.” 

“It’s been six years now. I should be doing another concert, but I’ve been doing lots of other things on Cortes. I’ve been doing the coffee houses, Celtic specialty ones, and general ones, and the Cabaret that Rick Bockner and Howie Roman started up for the radio station, as an adjunct to Lip syncs to raise money.”

“I’ve gone over to Denman Island and performed in their Baroque Opera for two years, 2018 and 2019.  One of them being the first opera that was ever written, ‘Orfeo’ by Monteverdi, and the next year, Purcell’s ‘Fairy Queen.’ It’s the thread, it continues and I keep following it.”

“ I sang at Lovefest the past two years.”

“For the 2022 Lovefest, I performed with Jason Andrews on piano. We have been working together since 2017, starting with the first CKTZ Cabaret fundraiser at Manson’s that year. We have had a lot of fun practicing with a performance here and there scattered over the years.”

“Pablo Casals, the renowned cellist, was asked in his 80s or 90s why he still practiced four or five hours a day. He said, ‘because I think I am making progress.’ Ditto that.” 

“At this year’s Lovefest, I sang with the Wiley Ferguson Band. Wiley and I have a shared love of, and training in, Classical. One of the pieces I joined the band on was a characteristic Frank Zappa tune, ‘Dog Breath,’ which draws on multiple genres of music and has a catchy melody to boot. Zappa was a totally new, progressive rock adventure for me.” 

“Another adventure I’m anticipating is reuniting with Ron Vermeulen, who recorded my vocals on ‘Straight from the Heart’ (1980). This time to put together an album with a focus on jazz standards, the ones I grew up on, and maybe with a few tunes that celebrate my Irish heritage, and a dash of classical, just because.”

“My dream at this point is to have a little combo here that I can do classic pop and jazz with because I do love jazz, and that really goes back to my family roots.”

Music Credits:

• ‘She moves through the Fair’ – Kim Paulley (acapella), ‘Songs My Mother Taught Me concert and Hollyhock coffee house, Bruce Hipkin (piano).
• ‘My Funny Valentine’ sung by Kim Paulley, Jason Andrews, piano
• The Winterreise Project – ‘Frühlingstraum’ (Dream of Spring). Kim Paulley (singer) & Derek Smith (piano). A joint reflective performance project run by the SongArt Performance Research Group, the Institute of Musical Research, London and hosted at the Victoria Conservatory of Music in Canada.
• ‘Is that all there is?’ – Kim Paulley (singer) and Jason Andrews (piano) Dave Blintzinger (sax), Leonard Woywitka (Bass) and Devon( drums) – from CKTZ’s Cabaret (2017) 
• ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’- Kim Paulley (singer), Margaret McLynn (Piano) – Blue Hour concert at Gorge Hall (2017).

Most of the photos are courtesy Kim Paulley, exceptions are noted in the credits above.

Sign-up for Cortes Currents email-out:

To receive an emailed catalogue of articles on Cortes Currents, send a (blank) email to subscribe to your desired frequency:

• Daily, (articles posted during the last 24 hours) – cortescurrents-daily+subscribe@cortes.groups.io
• Weekly Digest cortescurrents – cortescurrents-weekly+subscribe@cortes.groups.io