BRIGHTON — When 91-year-old Dolores “Bootsie” Kawa was a little girl growing up on a farm in Eau Claire, Wis., she learned a skill that recently won her a multi-state talent contest among senior community residents.
“My mom has yodel, and you pick it up,” Kawa said. “Either you have it or you don’t.
She said she and her mother Pearl yodeled together while cooking.
“She used to bake pies and cakes and give them to people in the neighborhood. Even though we were poor, she always shared,” Kawa said.
Earlier this year, Kawa was “shocked” when she was named the first winner of the 2023 Ageless Talent Show. Residents living in more than 40 StoryPoint Group senior communities across multiple states competed.
Marie Bush, executive director of Independence Village of Brighton Valley where Kawa lives, said the talent show was a new event for residents of StoryPoint Group communities.
“All we do is engage our residents,” Bush said. “We have so many talented residents in the community. It’s good for them to show it off and keep them engaged and entertained.”
Kawa reached the final after performing a classic country song “I Want to be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart” with her daughter Linda Frazee, a Brighton estate agent.
Frazee sang the a cappella tune and Kawa did the yodeling parts. They dressed up in western gear and charmed the crowds at Independence Village of Brighton Valley.
“I dragged her into it,” Kawa said. “We just knew there would be a contest,” and she wanted to enter.
Although she can’t dance like before due to Parkinson’s disease, Kawa and her daughter have made it work.
“She had to take me out in a wheelchair. I think Linda sings really well,” she said.
A life and a family of music
Kawa, who took the nickname Bootsie in her youth from a comic book character, found she enjoyed dancing at a young age, practicing her moves in the back of her grandfather’s truck.
“They called me a second Shirley Temple,” she said.
Kawa’s family moved to Detroit when she was little. After her father died at the age of 40, when she was 16, she had to leave school to work and help support the family. She worked as a waitress and at a print shop, among other jobs.
Frazee said his mother and father Raymond met when they were young in Detroit. Bootsie and Raymond married in Detroit in 1953 and raised three children. Kawa has three grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
“It was a boy riding a bike near her house, and she couldn’t stand it,” Frazee, who works with Brighton real estate team Terri Lloyd & Co. – Keller Williams Realty, said of his parents.
Frazee added that her mother isn’t the only one in the family with musical talent.
“We can all carry a melody,” Frazee said. “Once my dad thought I was gone. I was 18. He went to take a shower in the basement. I heard him sing in the shower. He was a quiet man, so singing must be in our genes.”
She said she and her mother also learned to play the 19th-century American folk song “Oh! Susanna” on the harmonica together.
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Kawa’s love of music, singing and dancing led her to Sounds of Canton, a performance group made up of local elders. She and her colleagues dressed in flashy outfits, sang and danced at places like the village theater and events for other senior citizens.
“We played at MGM Casino in Detroit. We did ‘Big Spender’ and won first place. We did our feathers,” she said. She then gestured as if twirling a feather boa and sang a few lines from the 1966 number, originally written for the Broadway musical “Sweet Charity” by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields and choreographed by Bob Fosse before appearing on a Peggy Lee album.
Bootsie joined Sounds of Canton after her husband died in 2001, just before their 50th wedding anniversary. She was also “Red Hatter”, a member of a local chapter of the Red Hat Society, a social organization for older women who wear red hats and purple clothes to parties. She said it was a way of being social and she made a lot of friends.
— Contact Livingston Daily reporter Jennifer Eberbach at jeberbach@livingstondaily.com.
