Beyond the Blues 

New Drug Gives Singer a Note of Hope After Near-Fatal
AIDS Bout 

By MICHAEL P. LUCAS, Times Staff Writer

MOORPARK--Sharonmarie Fisher says she was ready to die.

 Eight years ago she learned she was HIV-positive. By last
summer, she was hospitalized with AIDS-induced spinal
meningitis, and the 46-year-old country and blues singer had
already made her final plans. 
 Fisher gave away her jewelry to friends and relatives. She
even wrote her final song, "Take Me to the Mountain," and
asked them to bury her under a big oak tree. 

Fisher had given up hope, but in August she was referred to
AIDS specialist Michael Gottlieb in Los Angeles, who put her
on Crixivan--one of the new drugs that stop the human
immunodeficiency virus from reproducing. 
Fisher went from an advanced stage of AIDS to having no
detectable HIV in her blood. "She's had an incredible
turnaround," her neurologist, Aaron Aronow, said last week.
"Now you wouldn't know she was sick." 
It wasn't just the medicine that prompted her miraculous
recovery, said Fisher, who became a Christian 11 years ago.
She describes a dreamlike vision she had about angels one day
while in Midway Hospital in Los Angeles. 
"They lifted my pillow and were lifting my shoulders up and
I felt like I was being pushed [out of bed]," she said. "There
was a group of angels talking to each other. I was getting to
where I didn't want to come back [to life], and they were mad
at me. 
"That's when I said, 'The hell with this. I've got to get out of
the hospital again.' " 
After just two weeks, Fisher returned to her Moorpark
home to be with her husband, Dennis Laughery, a 46-year-old
vinyl salesman, and her basset hound, named Muddy Waters.
The entryway of her home is lined with photos showing Fisher
with celebrities-- Little Richard, blues artists Buddy Guy and
Junior Wells, and former President Ronald Reagan. 
Within weeks, Fisher picked up her electronic keyboard
and her old, cracked guitar--which is autographed by Bonnie
Raitt--and returned to the Southland nightclub circuit, where
she has been a well-known figure since a promoter brought her
from Alaska in 1986. 
"Everybody in the music business knows Sharonmarie, and
we all love her," said promoter Tina Mayfield. "She was pretty
sick and she said she wasn't going to pull through, but I knew
she was going to make it." 
* 
Now Fisher is busy putting together her sixth annual AIDS
benefit concert, to be held Sunday from 1 p.m. to midnight at
Jack's Sugar Shack, 1707 Vine St., in Hollywood. Once
again, she has invited all kinds of bands--rock, country blues,
even zydeco--to raise money for pediatric AIDS patients. 
Fisher believes God kept her alive to continue helping
children--a mission she embraced soon after she learned she
was HIV-positive, just two weeks before her wedding to
Laughery. She has a child from a previous marriage,
26-year-old Phillip John Maldonado Jr., but had hoped for
more. "What I did was find all the organizations that dealt with
children, because now I knew I couldn't have any kids from
Dennis," she said. 
Last year's concert raised $7,800 for Caring for Babies
With AIDS, which operates two Los Angeles-are foster
homes for children 8 and younger. Development director
Harriet Baron said Fisher also performed at the organization's
Nov. 10 Stroll-a-Thon AIDS walk and regularly visits the
group homes. "She hangs out with the kids, plays with them,
reads to them," Baron said. 
"It's important for me to be around kids," Fisher said during
an interview in her family room, which opens to a garden of
roses and cactuses and the rolling, grassy Campus Hills Park
beyond. 
If she wants it, Fisher has a job teaching children to sing in
musical productions at the Magnificent Moorpark Melodrama
and Vaudeville Co. 
"She's the best children's director I've had," said
owner-producer Linda Bredemann, who hired Fisher off and
on for seven years until the entertainer's health failed, and now
wants her back. "The kids like her a lot. She's down-to-earth,
patient. She teaches kids who couldn't carry a note in a basket.

* 
"When she first came to work she came to me and said she
had HIV," Bredemann said. "I said it's fine with me as long as
the rest of the cast knows. So we put it to them. Well, the
parents didn't mind . . . and the kids said it was fine." 
The theater families' acceptance is important to Fisher. She
has been greeted warmly by high school and college students
who have sent her more than 600 fan letters in the past three
years after hearing her no-nonsense talk about acquired
immune deficiency syndrome. 
"I tell them everything. I tell them how I got infected, and
that deceit and deception are the worst things that can happen
in a relationship," said Fisher, who had unprotected sex with
her boyfriend at the time, who was infected. 
A straightforward presentation, such as those given by
Fisher, is an approach endorsed by health experts. 
"It's better to hear that from the patients who can tell people
not to make the same mistakes," said Tessie Pijuan, a Ventura
County Public Health Department nurse who helped book
Fisher into an AIDS education forum Oct. 16 at Oxnard
College. "Young adults think they can't get this disease." 
Fisher was born in the Northern California town of
Martinez, one of seven children of an Oklahoma-born truck
driver and his Boston-born wife. When she was 10, somebody
gave the family an old upright piano with 15 broken keys.
Before long, Fisher was making her stage debut. 
"I sang with my sister's boyfriend, Larry," she recalls. "I had
my big white boots on and my little white skirt and my hair up,
and Mom showed me how to use the microphone. I made
$10, and that was the start of my career." 
By age 14, she was performing regularly with a local rock
band, and she continued to sing during high school and later at
Yuba College and at Cal State Chico. 
After a brief marriage to her high school sweetheart ended,
she headed north to Alaska with her toddler son. 
"I played clubs, coffeehouses, concerts, festivals--I went
for all of it," she said. "In Alaska, I started doing cocaine. I was
doing it because I was working 22 hours a day. Trying to raise
my son, and pay Alaska bills [and] trying to go to college." 
She said she had a religious conversion one morning in
1985 after she woke up to discover she had lost her truck in
the snow. That, she said, meant "getting out of drugs and
drinking and rock and roll bands. . . . Everybody was doing
drugs. . . . It was the rock scene." 
When she shifted her music to concentrate on country and
blues, her career took off. The next year a Los Angeles club
owner booked her for a gig and she ended up staying in
Southern California. Soon she was playing behind headliners
including Bonnie Raitt and Buddy Guy and opening for
folk-blues legend Taj Mahal. 
In the spring of 1987, she met Laughery, a Long Beach
native who was living in Reseda, when he came to watch her
perform one night at the Ban-Dar nightclub in Ventura. They
married the following year. 
You could say HIV brought Fisher and her husband to
Moorpark in 1989. They hoped that the clean air and
less-stressful surroundings would be beneficial for her. 
But four years ago, the virus caused what neurologist
Aronow described as recurrent aseptic meningitis, which in
Fisher's description, is like "drinking tequila and waking up . . .
knowing you drank the whole bottle. The lining of your brain is
so inflamed you can't touch any part of your head. You can't
move. You just lay there." 
* 
But Fisher's daily doses of Crixivan have increased her
T-cell count above 360--normal is about 550--and eased the
symptoms of meningitis enough to allow her to perform. 
While grateful for the recovery of her health, she finds her
brush with death has made her mindful of two friends she lost
in recent months: blues harmonica player William Clarke, who
died in Fresno on Nov. 2, and a 5-year-old girl who was living
in one of the Babies With AIDS homes. 
"She was pulling her little wagon and she had all her little
stuffed animals in there and she on her heart monitor," Fisher
said, describing one encounter with the frail tot. 
"She was a little blond--so beautiful. I was depressed and
sad, and she looked up at me and said, 'Do you see my
wagon?' and I said, 'I do, it's so beautiful.' And she goes,
'Well, you're supposed to smile, because the sun is out today!' 
"When I look at me with this disease and watching these
kids and they don't know what's going on, that's when I know
my work is for them. . . . It's just overwhelming, it makes you
become so unselfish, and you become very humble. 
She wiped her eyes and went over to her shiny black
Steinway upright and sang a bit of the song she had written to
her friends: 
"I only have to say that I'll never be alone / He gave me so
much love to share it all with you." 
And looking outside at the roses, she added with a giggle:
"Looks like I'll have to write another song: 'Darn it, I'm Not
Leaving After All.' " 
* * * 

FYI 
Sharonmarie Fisher's sixth annual Send Down An Angel
Christmas benefit will be held Sunday from 1 p.m. to midnight
at Jack's Sugar Shack, 1707 Vine St., in Hollywood. Tickets
cost $20. For information, call (213) 466-7005. 

 

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