by Robb Fulcher
The statuesque soprano performs in the world of opera, where a hunger for the next youthful phenom leads talented voices to burn out long before their time. Asbjornson, a life long singer but an opera singer only of late, personifies the reasons that her art form, even more than others, should resist the runaway youth culture.
"Your voice is really not ready to sing opera until age 30," she said between sips of peppermint tea at the Java Man coffeehouse. "It's not ready for the demands opera places on it."
Asbjornson has received glowing reviews for her command of her voice and the power of her stage presence in productions at the University of California - Irvine, and with Golden West Opera and California Chamber Ensemble. She now has her sights set on the world's great opera houses.
Asbjornson is glad she moved from pop singing to musical theater and now to opera in a way that has preserved her pipes for the push.
"I didn't take my first voice lesson until I was 29. Now I'm just approaching the wonderful years for my voice. About 35 to 50 are the golden years," she said.
"It has to do with the cartilage hardening," she said, running a finger to her throat. "It's like a violin, the way the varnish hardens."
Asbjornson's voice teacher, UCI's Nina HInson, became the youngest person ever to win the San Francisco Opera's prestigious Merola program, then struck while the singing iron was hot, and the early rigors "ruined her voice," Asbjornson said.
"That's one reason she's such a great teacher, she knows how important it is to avoid that," Asbjornson said.
Asbjornson has spent much of her years singing in a pop band that toured the Mediterranean, working as a singing mannequin on a shopping mall tour across the Midwest, singing in a wild-west musical theater show, and working as an on-the-set legal guardian for actors such as Macaulay Culkin and Juliette Lewis.
Asbjornson's journey to Hermosa was a winding one. She was born in Wyoming and raised in Montana and Texas.
"I was always a singer. I sang in school, in church, my mom has me singing Johnny Cash song," Asbjornson said. "I never thought of music as a career," she said. "I never had anybody to talk to about music."
During her college days in Texas, Asbjornson tried to study other things but "kept getting sucked back into the music department." She performed in several musicals, and then found herself singing in a pop band called Vince, Vance, and the Valiants. They were big regionally and would later record two songs that got radio play, "All I want for Christmas is You" and "Bomb Iran," a novelty hit from the days of the Iran hostage crisis, sung to the tune of "Barbara Ann" by the Beach Boys.
"We were a show band. I would go into the audience and sing to guys, and sit on their laps. We were just fun. Andy, the lead singer, would grab a girl from the audience and flip her around," Asbjornson said.
She also got into modeling, and found herself in the "Mannequins in Motion" as a singer and model in the touring company. Although she got to sing and even tap dance, a surprisingly fun part of the job was standing for 25 minutes in a store window, pretending to be a clothing mannequin.
"I thought I would get tired, but it was just a euphoric feeling, like meditating, I guess," she said. "The challenge was not to break. I would have people knock on the glass, I would have guys unzip my dress, I never moved."
As she returned intermittently to college, she found herself in another band called Trick. After only about a month Asbjornson and her band mates got booked to do shows for servicemen and women oversees.
"It was the same concept as the USO shows but without Bob Hope," Asbjornson said.
Trick toured Turkey, Greece, Italy, Spain and France.
"It was really exciting," Asbjornson said. "We sang on the U.S.S. Kittyhawk and the U.S.S. Yellowstone. We would perform for nine guys who were shut away on a mountaintop communication station, and they would be so grateful, and then we'd perform for 5,000 guys on an aircraft carrier."
Asbjornson "never had a rock and roll voice. The other girl sang the Led Zeppelin-type stuff and I would sing the softer Janet Jackson-type stuff."
During the overseas stint, Trick took 42 plane and helicopter flights over nine weeks. Asbjornson fondly recalled the sound of the C-130 transport planes.
"They were big, fat-bellied planes and they would make a low, fat rumble," she said.
In time Asbjornson "had enough of pop music." She made up her mind to go another route after she met a touring band in Joplin, Misouri.
"The girls were about 26 but they looked like they were in their 40s," Asbjornson said. "I thought, 'This is not the life I want.'"
She came to California to pursue acting, landed small parts on a couple of sitcoms including "Hudson Street" with Tony Danza and wound up with her guardian gig, in which she would live with actors who were minors while they were working away from home. The job satisfied a legal requirement fo rthe actors and, in the case of the younger ones, satisfied the need for a sorf of long-term babysitter.
"I knew that to really be an actess I had to be really thin. You have to be Courtney Cox thin," said the slender Asbjornson. "The same with modeling."
She got a job waiting tables at Wild Bill's Wild West Dinner Extravaganza in Buena Park, and when the resident Annie Oakley had to leave unexpectedly, Asbjornson talked her way into the show.
Since then she's returned to school to get her bachelor's degree in music, and she has performed in musicals locally including "A Little Night Music" at the James Armstrong Theater in Torrance and "The Campaign" at the Hermosa Playhouse.
Then she moved into the much more vocally demanding world of opera.
"In musical theater they want the acting, the depth, the story. In opera the music comes first. It's so different, so challenging. It's like vocal gymnastics," she said. ER