Self-styled superstar Boldly channelling the Downey, Calif. sound of Karen Carpenter — via Transcona By: David Sanderson Posted: 4:31 PM CDT Thursday, Aug. 24, 2023 Last Modified: 10:32 AM CDT Friday, Aug. 25, 2023 Updates

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This article was published 24/08/2023 (1107 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

She’s only just begun.

The first time singer Nadia Douglas portrayed Karen Carpenter, the late lead vocalist of beloved ’70s Downey, Calif., pop duo the Carpenters, was in March 2019, at the Rady Jewish Community Centre.

The show, billed as Yesterday Once More: A Tribute to the Carpenters, was an overwhelming success; so much so that Douglas promised to return the following March, for an encore performance.

Unfortunately, a certain global pandemic threw a wrench into that plan.

Proving yet again that good things come to those who wait, Douglas will reprise her role as the Grammy Award-winning chanteuse on Aug. 31, at the Centre Culturel Franco-Manitobain.

Together with a crack band that features Rick Boughton as Richard Carpenter, Karen’s keyboard-playing brother, Douglas hopes to have attendees feeling on top of the world, as she delivers one Carpenters smash after another, including Close to You, There’s a Kind of Hush and Please Mr. Postman.

“I’ve loved the Carpenters ever since I was a kid, and had always included one or two of their tunes in my sets,” explains Douglas, who started singing professionally a dozen years ago, not long after her 45th birthday.

It never failed; the second Douglas, who mainly splits her time between a jazz trio dubbed the Nadia Douglas Band and a dance-party group called the Dynamics, launched into a song made famous by the American duo, people in the room would get “all googly-eyed.”

“Finally I began thinking why not do an entire Carpenters show?” she continues, seated in a Southdale coffee shop not far from the two-storey abode she shares with her husband Reid.

“It was so much fun, I’m only sorry it took this long to get around to doing it again.”

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To say Douglas’s career path has been unique is putting it mildly.

She was born in England, the youngest of three siblings. Her mother, who was from Stoke-on-Trent, met her father, who had moved to the U.K. from the Middle East to attend university, in the late 1950s. Omar Sharif was big at the time, and her mom was immediately attracted to her dad owing to the fact he greatly resembled the Egyptian actor, she says with a wink.

The way she understands the yarn, her parents were attending a movie one evening when a preview came on, advertising the merits of life in Canada. They agreed it sounded like a grand idea, and applied to emigrate to Vancouver, which they understood to be an ideal setting.

“Except they were informed that B.C. was full, which is how we ended up in Transcona, instead, when I was five,” Douglas says.

Their first stay here was short-lived. Her family moved back to London when Douglas was eight, only to leave there for Baghdad a few months later. Her mother never felt comfortable in the Iraqi capital, however — “because of the way women were treated, she basically said, ‘this ain’t happening,’” Douglas intones — so they ultimately returned to Winnipeg, where they purchased a house two blocks from where they had been living previously.

(Seems you can take the girl out of Transcona, but you can’t take Transcona out of the girl. Douglas hasn’t called that neck of the woods home for over 40 years but still gets a craving for Dal’s pizza, every now and again.)

Douglas was a divorced mother of one daughter, Amanda, when she met her future husband, a firefighter, at the Nor-Villa Hotel, where she was employed as a server.

She and Reid tied the knot in 1994 and moved to Vancouver in 2000, along with Amanda and a daughter of their own, Ashley. There she worked as a paramedic while he served as the assistant chief or chief of fire departments in first, North Vancouver and later, Yellowknife.

Douglas, who remained in B.C. with the girls during Reid’s tenure in the Northwest Territories, guesses it was around 2006 when she announced she wanted to add “actor” to her resumé. Never mind that she had zero experience in the field; within a few weeks of securing an agent, she was getting cast in multiple television commercials and film projects.

Why acting, when she was already busy raising two kids around a medical career?

“You know how when you’re watching a remarkable movie and it changes who you are or how you think?” she replies. “Simply put, I wanted to be a part of that.”

In 2011 the Douglasses returned to Winnipeg, where Reid had been hired as the city’s fire chief, a title he held until 2013.

That fall she enrolled in a broadcasting course, believing she would try her hand at television or radio. She did her practicum at 680 CJOB. Despite her best efforts, she failed to catch on at the station, a set of circumstances she now describes as the “best job I never got.”

“You know how when you’re watching a remarkable movie and it changes who you are or how you think?… Simply put, I wanted to be a part of that.”–Nadia Douglas on pursuing acting

The reason for that is she had changed her mind yet again, career-wise, and was now convinced her true calling was on a stage, fronting a live band.

“Growing up I was 100 per cent that kid in their bedroom with a hairbrush as microphone, singing along to Sonny and Cher on TV,” she says, breaking into the opening verse of I Got You Babe.

“Except because singing was fundamentally who I was as opposed to what I was when I worked as a server, paramedic or whatever, I felt like I couldn’t suck. I had to be good or else.”

Since the word “shy” isn’t part of her vocabulary, she cold-called highly regarded bandleader Ron Paley, to ask if she could audition for his jazz ensemble. Again, she had no formal training, the same as when she took up acting, but why let that get in the way of a dream, was her thought.

To his credit, Paley invited her to drop by his place. He presented her with a set of vocal charts, and said he would accompany her on piano. (Did she mention she can’t read music?)

When they were finished, he said she was definitely talented, but would require some seasoning. Her best bet, he said, was to reach out to Danny Kramer, who was hosting live-band karaoke nights at Club Regent Casino.

She heeded Paley’s advice. Two weeks later, she blew the house away with her rendition of the Everly Brothers’ classic, When Will I Be Loved, as recorded by Linda Ronstadt, another of her musical heroes.

One of the people in the audience that evening was the Free Press’s Maureen Scurfield. In a report for the paper, Scurfield described Douglas’s take as “fiery,” and a “surprise American-Idol type moment.”

“I took Danny for coffee that month, to pick his brain about how the music industry in Winnipeg works, and what I would need to do, to become a professional singer,” Douglas goes on.

Kramer quizzed Douglas, asking her what style of music she wanted to specialize in. She told him she enjoyed the “old stuff” — standards from the 1930s and ’40s primarily. She was subsequently introduced to saxophonist Walle Larsson, who offered her some advice on how to form a band.

Around playing tony venues such as the Palm Lounge at the Fort Garry Hotel and the al fresco patio at InFerno’s Bistro, she also found time to record an eponymously titled CD.

“The rest, as they say, is history,” she reports, taking a sip of her coffee.

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Leaning forward in her chair, Douglas says she definitely gets joy out of singing, but it hasn’t been all sunshine and lollipops — far from it.

Both of her parents were in their mid-60s when they died of cancer. She lost her youngest daughter in October 2017, six months after Ashley was diagnosed with a brain tumour.

That’s the same malady her other daughter has been battling since 2021. When Douglas herself was told two years ago that she had cancer, her reaction wasn’t “woe, me?” but rather, “why not me?”

“Why I’m sharing this with you is the same reason I shaved my head online after my diagnosis: to hopefully use as a platform to encourage people to chase their dreams,” she says, noting she currently has a clean bill of health, touch wood.

“You don’t have to go through as much as my family has — God forbid — but challenges are still challenges. Instead of saying, ‘gosh, poor me,’ I’d love it if even one person said ‘if Nadia’s out there doing it, I can, too’ even if it’s just being goofy with your partner, or calling a pal you haven’t spoken to in years, but are always meaning to. Life’s short, y’know.”

As for Thursday’s show, Douglas promises to work her “butt” off to honour Karen Carpenter’s memory, once again. The intention is to film the goings-on, and pitch the end-result to casino managers across Western Canada, to see if there is any interest in booking the act outside the province.

If that comes to pass, fantastic, if not, c’est la vie, she says.

“You know that saying, you can get busy living or you can get busy dying? After we lost Ashley I had one foot here and one foot there,” she says, looking up.

“In the end, I chose living, and later this week, I’ll prove that to everybody who is nice enough to buy a ticket to the show.”

david.sanderson@freepress.mb.ca