Alternate Biographies:
Capricon 26 (2006)
Dr. Mary Crowell
Written by Marty Coady Fabish
Dr. Mary Crowell lives with her husband, Wolfgang, and their son, Schnitzel, in a quaint gingerbread cottage at the very center of an enchanted forest....
No, wait; that's not right. Let’s try again…
Dr. Mary Crowell captains a sleek little interstellar smuggling ship, "The Millennium Brunette". She lives by her wits at the Outer Edge of Known Space with her roguish first mate, Wexx, and their mischievous mascot, Squirt, as they...
Nope. That's not Mary, either. But they both could be.
Mary, along with her legendary husband, Wesley, and their adorable son, Simon, dwells in the fabled land of story and song known as 'Alabama'. Musically, she is The Real Deal, holding a B.A in piano performance, an M.M. in musicology and a D.M.A. in music composition. Currently, she teaches music appreciation, class piano, and private piano lessons at Calhoun Community College in Decatur, Alabama. In addition, she practices and teaches yoga. In her copious free time, she trains in Shotokan and Wado karate.
Mary Crowell is probably not that well known outside filk circles (at least, not yet). This is her first guest appearance in the Chicago area, and we welcome her to Capricon. She's been attending filk conventions since 2001, and has already received multiple Pegasus nominations, both as a songwriter ("When I Grow Up") and in the Best Performer category. Mary is now the fourth member of the band Three Weird Sisters, along with Brenda Sinclair Sutton, Gwen Knighton and Teresa Gibson Powell. (Four 'Three Weird Sisters', you ask? Well, yes; TWS is the tesseract of musical groups, larger on the inside than it is on the outside. Think 'Thompson Twins'. But I digress.)
Words that come to mind when I think of Mary: nimble, limber, lithe. Not just her focused physicality, what with all that yoga and karate; no, it's so very much more than that. Come to her concert, or drop in at open filk in the evenings. Watch the way her fingers dance across that keyboard. Listen to the myriad colours she coaxes from those black and white keys. Above all, talk to her this weekend -- about music, or fandom, or gardening, or gaming, or the geeky glories of Finale 2005b -- and you'll begin to understand just how nimble, how limber, how lithe our Mary Crowell truly is.
