Started singing in my elementary school chorus when I was 11, but I really found my voice at 14 when I began singing solo.

Helen Reddy, 1974, Westbury Music Fair, New York. I went with my parents and my brother. She was my idol at the time, so seeing her perform live was a big deal for me.

Helen Reddy and Cher. I used to see them on TV, and loved the way they sang and performed.

I am in two bands. The Newports is an oldies band that has been in existence for 50 years. I joined them when their keyboard player heard me singing karaoke just when they happened to need a new female vocalist. The Traveling Bluejayes is an acoustic group that was formed last year. We were already friends, and we wanted to start playing unplugged music as a group. Both bands play locally around the Washington, DC area.

Neil Diamond - He's a god!

Las Vegas, 2004, to hundreds of people in the street at the Fremont Street Experience. I have many memorable performances, but this one stands out. The smallest audience was about five on a particularly slow night at a local club last summer.

My current Desert Island Disk is Mermaid Avenue by Billy Bragg and Wilco. It's a project that came about when Woody Guthrie's daughter found thousands of songs that her dad had written but never recorded, and he took the original melodies to his grave. Nora Guthrie contacted rock musician Billy Bragg and asked him if he would compose new melodies for these songs and record them. Bragg got the band Wilco involved, and the resulting CD is a musical masterpiece.