Cammi MacKinlay 2019 Sweet Adelines Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient “I make time to do the things I love”
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hortly after Lions Gate Chorus performed the package that would result in a second-place medal at the 2019 international competition, 33-year member Cammi MacKinlay walked back onstage to receive the 2019 Sweet Adelines Lifetime Achievement Award. It was appropriate that this accomplished singer was still wearing full stage make up and costume along with her ever-present strand of pearls, for, as she said, “that’s what I love doing: singing and performing. That’s what I joined to do.” In addition to singing bass with Lions Gate Chorus, her 20-year quartet Fandango, and her new quartet, Cascadence, Cammi has “done just about every job ever invented by the inventive Sweet Adeline mind,” as International President Patty Cobb Baker said in her introduction. Cammi has taken on responsibilities at the quartet, chorus, regional, and international level, including a two-year stint as international president (2010-2012), and sixteen years on the International Board of Directors. Seven years ago, she retired from a decades-long career teaching English as a Second Language. “I honestly don’t know how I did it when I was working full time, but I did,” she said. “I never thought of it as work. It was just learning. I make time to do the things I love, basically.” Sometimes that meant living with “sequins from one end of the house to the other” while making quartet costumes or, in the early days, rushing home from rehearsal to care for her young daughter and nurse her infant son at 10 p.m. Cammi considers it all part of creating value in her life and in her world.
“I don’t think I’ve done anything extraordinary, but I’ve worked away and done what was asked of me to the best of my ability,” she said. “I’ve always tried to be a person of value…to my family, to my wonderful husband, to my chorus, to my job. I really try to be a person of value in everything I do.” In 2006, when she was serving as vice president of the organization, Cammi was diagnosed with Stage 3 ovarian cancer. “I announced my diagnosis on the webcast and wrote articles about it in The Pitch Pipe, and the messages of support I got were just unbelievable. When my sister came to visit from Scotland, she said, ‘There’s a lot of healing going on in this house.’ She could feel me being surrounded by people who wanted me to survive. I definitely felt surrounded by love and hope and desire to continue on. I’m still here 13 years later, and I just feel incredibly blessed by that support and love I got from everybody who I encountered.” As she noted in her acceptance speech, Cammi is “not done yet.” Several projects are on the horizon, including serving as co-chair of IES 2020 in San Antonio, Texas and, of course, mentoring other singers. “I've had lots of great mentors and people who saw my potential, and now I have people who I am mentoring, in whom I see potential,” she said. “I'm paying it forward because I know what that meant to me as an individual, and there are others who are coming up behind me who need that same kind of encouragement and help, mentoring, and advice that I can now provide.” In that way, Cammi’s lifetime achievement continues. Nobody who knows her is surprised.
January 2020 |
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