Honoring a nation and a friend

Michele Marr

Eric Strom and Debi Wheeler-Ure often sang together at the Huntington

Beach Church of Religious Science. For a year before Strom’s death on

Easter Day in 1995, they were co-directors of music at the church.

Wheeler-Ure considered Strom her mentor. She was a perfectionist

and he taught her spontaneity.

“Eric taught me the finest lesson of performance, which is, ‘get

out of the way and let God take over ‘cuz honey, this stuff just

isn’t about you,’” said Wheeler-Ure. “Most of all, we were great

friends.”

Each year on the weekend before the Fourth of July, the church

presents the Eric Strom Memorial Concert, a patriotic-themed concert

and homage to Strom that also celebrates his favorite holiday.

Those twin purposes bring special significance to the program for

Wheeler-Ure who directs the concert each year.

It gives her a chance to honor her mentor and friend while also

paying tribute to those who have served to protect the this country’s

freedom, men like her grandfather, a veteran of World War I; her

father, a veteran of World War II; and her brother, a veteran of the

Vietnam War.

Friday night, the eighth annual concert, “A Salute to Freedom,”

will feature a line-up of all-American music, some songs tried and

true, some new, along with short segments of dramatic readings.

While celebrating this nation’s civic freedoms, the two-hour

program also celebrates the spiritual freedom embraced by the

philosophy of Religious Science.

“In our philosophy we choose daily to be free from hatred,

judgment, petty criticism and the like,” said Wheeler-Ure. “We have

the opportunity to be the masters of our own destiny as we co-create

our lives with God. So when we salute freedom, we really salute

freedom, a personal choice to be made on a daily and sometimes hourly

basis.”

She is confident that the show will entertain but she hopes that

it will, in the end, do something more. She hopes the music will find

its way deep into the hearts and the minds of those in audience and

evoke in them a profoundly personal response.

“That is what is most important to me,” she said. “We are so

desensitized these days that an emotional response to anything is a

miracle.”

After a concert, when people tell her that the music touched them,

or that a particular song reminded them of someone or a special time

in their lives, she is gratified.

“If we do that for our audience, if we give them that, then I feel

we’ve done a great job,” Wheeler-Ure said. “A good musical score

plays our emotions like a harp.”

Friday’s program of songs, some high-spirited and patriotic,

others familiar and nostalgic, promises to do just that.

The church’s 20-member choral ensemble, Heartsong, will sing a

medley of early American music and

Wheeler-Ure will sing a medley of Harold Arlen scores written

during the Depression and World War II. She will introduce the songs

with a prologue about Arlen and the times during which he wrote the

songs.

Dalise Lindsay, the church’s American Sign Language interpreter

will sign most of the program.

She will close the program with “an amazing arrangement” of “The

Star-Spangled Banner.”

“I love this country. Always have. Always will. It’s an honor to

salute our freedom, its origins and its foundations,” she said.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].