This was the moment I first met Connie...thank you Karen for this treasured memory and Dear Ida up in heaven for making it happen.	I can remember her exact words!
I took this photo upstairs at the Diplomat Hotel in 1989. I think she was laughing at me for taking so many photos, but this was my first time meeting her!	See she was laughing ha ha...but, I didn't care... I got to finally meet my HERO! this weekend was the highlight of my life...

until...

this moment...which was so special...leading up to...

This moment!

But...what was even better is....

She made this my Mother's  Happiest Moment!

Mama was on a cloud for days! THEN...she called her to wish her Happy Birthday on her 80th Birthday!
She was on a cloud for a month...telling everyone who had called her! (THANKS TERRY...I LOVE YOU!)

And....a PLUS is getting to know really COOL people like these two! (Thanks Mike)

 

I can't tell you the first time I ever heard Connie Francis sing, I do know I was between 10 and 11 years old. I can also tell you that it had a profound impact on me. When her voice would come through the radio, I was mesmerized. I would stop whatever I was doing and just listen to her. I acquired a love for harmony, I would listen to her songs like “My Happiness” and say to myself...”I wonder why that girl who is singing with her doesn’t make her own records? She sounds just like her!” I knew nothing about “overdubbing” or anything outside of my small little world. I was just a naive kid from a little town on the outskirts of New Orleans, La.

My life was pretty normal from birth to 6 years old. Then it began to unravel and it left many scars, wounds that never healed and it was only the beginning of the peaks and valleys to come. The year I was 6 was one of the worst of my life. It all went crazy; my father left us for mama’s “best friend”, which taught me at a very early age about trust and loyalty. Some people just don’t have it in them to be honest. Well, when things didn’t work out for him, he wanted to come back home…but, mama had been burned once and she wasn’t having it.

So, drunk and rejected and I am sure sad for his actions, he left the place she was working and walked in front of a car driven by another drunk soul, who hit him and just kept driving, they got his license plate number and the police found him at home eating a pork chop, with no concern that he had just killed another human being. That night of Feb 1^st 1954 was a turning point in my life. I had already grownup too fast, with things happening that I won’t even go into, but made me very withdrawn, shy and fearful. My soul was sad.

Well, God intervened and he sent me an angel to make my life a little better, his name was Jack and he was a brother of mama’s cousin’s husband. “We married him” September 9^th, 1954 and life started to look like it might be worth living again. He used to laugh and say, “I got a deal for $5.00; I got a wife, a kid, a house and car and I haven’t stopped paying for it yet”. Fortunately for me, he was born and raised in Florida, and after trying to live in our city, he wanted to go home. So, we packed up and on July 2^nd, 1956 we moved to a place that at first was scary but became by haven, we went from hell to paradise.

I was painfully shy. I was a loner, staying in my room listening to music most of the time. When we first moved there, I was teased and taunted by daddy’s relatives kids and neighborhood kids because I had a “Cajun accent” and then I was told “I was doomed to hell, because I was a Catholic” in a very Baptist town. Moving away from all that was familiar to me was so hard, we had a large close knit family, and we all lived close to each other so we were together every day. I never was alone, but when we moved, I had "NO ONE!" So, MUSIC became my best friend.

My world consisted of Music, food, music, and food! What didn’t fill one hole in my soul, the other did. I soon bloomed into an overweight, lonely child. After being hurt and shunned by people in my new hometown, I was painfully afraid to try to make friends, I just knew they wouldn’t like me or they would make fun of me. So, if someone offered me friendship, I would warm up to them, but I was reluctant to make friends on my own.

I hated going to school, it was torture to me. My 5^th grade teacher even made fun of me in front of the class because of my accent. So, I figured, if they are going to laugh at me, I’ll give them a reason to laugh. I became the class clown! I wanted to run away and go back “home to my familiar family” where we all talked like that and most people were Catholic and no one said I was going to go to hell because of it.

Needless to say, I didn’t excel in school. I wanted to quit, but daddy would not hear of it. He didn’t get to have an education and he wasn’t going to allow me to mess up my life. So, I bartered with them. Let me join the school band and I would go to school and graduate.  It worked! Soon we were on the local music store looking at a Tenor Saxophone! I just HAD to have it! But, it was very expensive. One of the many things about my daddy was he was not cheap. He grew up with hardly anything, so since he had a good job and mama was very penny wise, we had a good and comfortable life. So, getting a “used instrument” was not even a thought for him. “You get what you pay for” was his motto.

He looked at me and asked…”are you sure you are going to stick with this”…I pleadingly said…”oh yes daddy”…and in his normal humorous way he said…”you better, or you’ll have the most expensive necklace in Mowat Jr. High!”  Well stick with it I did, all the way to college. I was in the marching, concert and dance bands in Jr. High and High School and College.

My goal was to go to college and major in music. I wanted to be a songwriter. I wanted so badly to go to Troy State University. They had a really good music school, but mama said we couldn’t afford it because of housing cost. So, I had to go to the local community college. This is where the nightmare really begins….I met the most despicable egomaniac I ever saw in my life and he just happened to be the head of the Music Department!

I can carry a tune, no problem, let me hear it once and I nailed it. I could play it on my sax, no problem; I could even pick it out on a piano. But, for some reason, I never associated the sound a note to the name or the key to my vocal chords... Tell me to hit a “C” is like telling me to speak in a foreign language. If you said the word, I might know what it meant, but I couldn’t speak the language. So, I had that man as my teacher for one class, and of all classes it was “sight reading” Oh how I used to wish I could be Connie just for this class every time I had it. It was awful!

He made sure he embarrassed me as often as possible, you see he was one of those people that if you “kiss up too” everything was fine, but I never was a “kiss up” especially to someone who was unkind to me. So that made it even harder for me and making it even more difficult, because of my shyness and fear of being laughed at, there were friends in there from high school who had taken voice classes privately for many years; One of them sat right behind me and she was really good, she was even 1^st runner-up in the Miss. Florida pageant and won the Talent competition.

Well this one morning, he eyed me and called on me, I felt her hand touch my shoulder and she whispered to me “show him you can do it, we know you can” for some reason that filled me with a little fearful confidence…he played his one chord and I read the notes on the sheet, with my la, de, da’s and all of a sudden the room burst into a thunderous applause! I had done it and they were so glad I showed him I could! I was so red…but felt pretty proud of myself for not giving into my fears for once and doing something I knew I could do but was just afraid of being laughed at if I didn’t do it perfectly.

Well I did pretty well in all of my classes but his. Finals came and he scheduled me the first one in the morning like 8 am or something. I can hardly speak that hour of the day, so fagetabout singing!

There I was just him and I alone in the room, he handed me the music, played his one chord and I froze with fear! I did just as he wanted me too. I FAILED! So, he told me to go take some business classes that he would not allow me to take any music classes anymore, even though his was the only one I didn’t do well in. He told me I had no talent. I begged him to let me take a voice class and he refused. I was crushed. I cried all the way home. I went into my bedroom, turned on my record player and turned on a Connie album and started singing at the top of my lungs! I had the sound so loud mama had to tell me to turn it down, but I didn’t want them to hear me crying.

I strained my voice so badly that day; I got a huge knot in it ... a big lump; it felt like I had swallowed an egg! I could hardly swallow it hurt so badly. But, who cared, I wasn’t going to be singing anyway… but singing was never what I wanted to do. Not all songwriters are good singers.  I had only 2 dreams in my short life, 1 was to be a songwriter and the other was to one day meet Connie in person. Well one had just been removed from my life very painfully and so I still felt there was hope for the other to happen one day.

I ended up quitting college and went to Beauty School in Tallahassee. That was fun, being away from home and going to school, I would say; “if they had just let me go to Troy State, none of this would have happened”. But who knows? You can’t know the answers to what never was. It is always only a “what if” or a “might have been” moment; yet another dream that never got the chance to live.

I worked in a few shops, and I moved from place to place, doing many different kinds of work just to make a living. I worked very hard jobs, whatever paid the most I did it no matter how hard it was. Several times I worked two or three jobs at a time. Life was never easy after High School. I remember how I used to laugh when people would say that to me, “You’ll wish these times were back one day” Oh how true were those pearls of wisdom.

When I would go anywhere, I always took certain things with me; my precious Connie Francis Collection was usually the first thing packed. I do not think that I would be alive today had it not been for Connie’s voice soothing all of the many painful encounters in my life. I do not cry much, I hold it in and that is dangerous. But Connie can MAKE me cry; with just a tone in her voice or a word perfectly phrased in a haunting melody she can break me down to a mush! “NO ONE” else can do that to me. When times got really hard and I wanted to just die, I would turn her music on, turndown the lights, burn some candles and cry my heart out. She is my “Band aid”; she has helped me heal every wound ever pierced into my soul. No matter what happened, Connie had a song or several songs for it. She always helped me “make it through the rain”. How many days and nights have I thanked God for Connie Francis!

I recall driving home from an all night out in the French quarter in 1974, it was daylight when we left, my roommate was following me home in her car and she started to blow the horn at me and made me a signal to pull over, I did and she pulled up beside me and yelled for me to “turn on the radio, they were talking about Connie” I did and what I heard pierced my heart like nothing I had ever felt for another human being! Connie had been brutally attacked in a Westbury hotel room. I was so sick inside. I thought my heart was going to break for her. Here she was the only person who could pierce the armor of my soul, now needing someone to comfort her and I was helpless to do anything for her. I cried like a baby all the way home….but this time my tears were for her to heal not for me.

After that, Connie went through a living hell; ups and downs, highs and lows. I had been writing to her for years and I always got a reply. It may have come from her staff, but still she never failed me. So, I wrote to her, even when no reply came, I still wrote. I wanted to let her know that she was so cared about, that I knew she was hurting and I understood and I was there through the good and the bad times for her. I would read things about her, many not very nice; they were horrible to her in the press at times. It broke my heart to know what she was going through. I understood it so well, because I had been hurt by words and had my heart pierced and wounded by people who I thought I could trust, only to discover once again like when I was 6 years old, not everyone is honest and trustworthy.

I eventually ended up along with my friend Charlie, running a CF Fan Club, right about the time she did her return to Westbury. Up until I met Charlie I had “NO ONE” to discuss Connie or her music with, I never knew anyone who appreciated her like I did. So, through the fan club, I was privileged to meet some wonderful people from around the world who like me loved and appreciated Connie’s music. This opened a whole new world to me that I had missed for many years.

Connie was always so sweet to me, she wrote to me, sent me gifts, Christmas cards, albums, photos etc. It was a wonderful time for me. She called me once when she was in Dallas, but I wasn’t home, she left a message, but no number to call her back… I have so regretted missing that call. But, Connie wasn’t having the best of times. She was going through some troubling times in her life and I was getting phone calls from people who knew her telling me things that had happened and it was so hard. Next thing I saw the stories in those “rags” and now though it was more difficult because I already knew they had some truth to them. My dear sweet Connie was being tormented by her own mind.

I moved back to Florida and ended up working in a Mental Hospital/Treatment Center. I LOVED this job. When I would read or hear about Connie being put in a hospital I would say, "God why don’t you send her to me so I can be nice to her!"... I knew how it was in there, so I felt awful because I knew firsthand what she was living through. She was hardheaded and refused to take the one medication that helped her. I was told because it made her gain weight. God did I know all about how it felt to be fat!

I am going to cut to the chase here because I am 61 years old and I have had a long life, a lot has happened and in the center of it all in some way Connie was present. I did finally get to meet her, and it was a warm and comfortable moment for me. I simply said; “Hi Connie, I’m Carol Adams” and this warm, sweet smile came to her face, one of recognition and true connection. I sat next to her and we spoke awhile, many people were there to see her so I didn’t want to have anyone not have the same moment I was living. I had finally lived out one of my lifelong dreams. I met my HERO! I guess “one out of two ain’t bad!” Especially when that "one" is so rewarding.

It is now 2008 and in March my mother and I had the pleasure of spending almost a week in Florida, near Connie’s home. She did a show in Coral Springs, which was fantastic! Her voice was so strong, she looked great, she seemed so happy and at peace in her soul.

I got the pleasure to just sit and talk to her and Terry a few times and she was always accommodating and answered anything I asked her, very honestly. I appreciate that about her. She is honest to a fault! She is such a great role model; she has done so much in her life. She has gone from the top to the bottom and now she is peacefully in the ultimate spot for her; she has found her own serenity. "She made it through the rain!"  She dealt with her issues and has helped many people with her kind and generous heart, giving quietly never wanting anything in return.  She has surrounded herself with people who care about her and look out for her. Which makes me and others who care about her VERY happy. What a Woman!

So, being basically a painfully shy person who is more comfortable behind the scenes, doing this is very hard for me. But, something deep inside of me compelled me to do it. Because the people who don’t understand my devotion and loyalty to Connie often think I am crazy; they just don’t “get it.” It’s like the song says…”It’s like trying to tell a stranger about rock n roll”

I am now a part of an international mailing list on yahoo.com that is exclusively for Connie Francis Fans. I have met some of the most wonderful people through “The List.” I treasure them all. Though they range from teenagers to my age and older, from all walks of life, we all have one thing in common. Our unshaken devotion to that little bitty girl from Newark, N.J. Concetta Franconero!

I hope that this has somehow shown people who do not understand why I say she is "MY HERO" Why she means so very much to me and to so many people around the world who like me KNOW the true "Magic of Connie Francis!"

Vaya Con Dios  Concetta!

 

 

Please allow time for ActiveX controls to load audio files.
 Connie sings "This is my Happiest Moment"  from the  Movie "Looking for Love" and
"I Made it Through The Rain" from  a live performance at Chicago's Mill Run Theater 1/23/1982

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