Performer Fran Owens sings with resident Howard Wigfall during an entertainment hour at Sancta Maria Nursing Facility in Cambridge on Aug. 30, 2018.

‘Yours truly, Fran Owens’

Former Ms. Senior Massachusetts’ one-woman musical show kicks it up a notch

NATICK – It’s after 2 p.m. on a Monday and 75-year-old Fran Owens is kicking in high gear.

Irving Berlin’s 1933 holiday standard, “Easter Parade,” rang out before an audience of about 35 patients in wheelchairs and recliners at the Mary Ann Morse Healthcare Center in Natick. In a cascading blond wig and luscious fake eyelashes, Owens grasped a microphone winking with jewels, sweeping her arm over the crowd as she sang the old chestnut. Stretched across her glittering gold mini-dress was a sash emblazoned with “Ms. Senior Massachusetts,” an honor she won in 2007.

“We’re doing a mish-mash of music today,” Owens told her audience, after the song played out. “Is mish-mash a word? I think so.”

More than a dozen times a month, Owens takes her one-woman show to nursing homes, senior centers and adult day cares around Massachusetts, bringing live entertainment to seniors. The catalog of decades-old songs she sings - ranging from “Give My Regards To Broadway” to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” - was the soundtrack to most of the residents’ lives.

And her renditions of songs such as “Who Said There’s Something Wrong with Being Single?” and “I Just Don’t Look Good Naked Anymore” have racked up thousands of hits online and counting.

“I do it because I love it. Even if I had money, which I don’t, I would definitely still do this,” said the Stoneham resident. “My goal is to make a difference in somebody else’s life. I mean, I say hi to everybody. They might not say hi to me, but hey — I’m busy.”

Fran Owens gets ready for a performance at her home in Stoneham on Dec. 7, 2018. Owens describes her makeup routine as transforming into a butterfly.

Owens was born in Bingham, a small town of just over 900 that sits along the Kennebec River in western Maine. The town has no stoplights, but a welcome sign heralds the community’s position as the halfway mark between the equator and the North Pole.

As a child, she was sick with whooping cough and pneumonia for almost a year. When she recovered, Owens' mother asked her what she wanted to do for her fourth birthday and her answer was something with music. Her mother took her to see a band play, and a talent show was held in the middle of the performance.

“I didn’t ask anybody. I just stood up in my little blue suit and marched up to the back of the stage and pulled on the guy’s pant leg and said, ‘I want to sing,’” said Owens. “And I did and I won.”

Owens won $5 for her part, which “in 1947 was a lot of money,” she said. After that taste of stardom, she learned classical piano, tap dancing and gymnastics. By her teenage years, she was singing with a 17-piece band and maintaining a winning streak in baton twirling contests.

After graduating high school, she became a licensed hairdresser, a fallback plan “in case the voice should ever go,” Owens said. At 19, she married and left Maine to spend three years in Elk City, Oklahoma, where she sang with a band for several years.

Owens zigzagged across the country in pursuit of a full-time career in entertainment, a chase that once saw her caught in riot-torn Curacao following a 1969 performance in the Caribbean Island. Eventually, the mother of two boys and two girls moved to New Hampshire, where she sang in local nightclubs and restaurants.

“It’s been all of my life,” said Owens, on singing.

In 1971, she  released an album, “Many Sides of Fran Owens,” recorded with Fleetwood Records, a Revere label. The 13-track record, featuring a photo of a young Owens with heavily made up eyes and her hair piled high on her head, lives on in corners of the Internet.

“Fran Owens isn’t a copy of anyone. Her style isn’t contrived. She sings in the Fran Owens style – and that’s something,” reads a Worcester Telegram review printed on the album.

As she worked to establish a name for herself, Owens struggled through a string of failed marriages: 12 in total. Owens said codependency and dysfunction marked her past relationships, saying she used to “survive by trying to latch onto someone else.”

The constant shifting saw Owens picking up and moving on to the next place every few years, trying to see what fit and what did not.  

“I was either here and I wasn’t there long, then I was with some other family shortly, then I knew somebody else’s family. It was all traveling a lot, living in different places,” said Owens.  

After her 10th divorce, when she “hit bottom,” Owens moved back to Massachusetts in the 2000s, by then in her late 50s, to seek therapy.

“We’d all like to have married our high school sweetheart and have a white picket fence and a dog and a station wagon, but that didn’t happen for me,” said Owens.

The move back to Massachusetts marked a new age for Owens. She began to feel better about herself and, after counseling, make better decisions. She became a born-again Pentecostal Christian. She married and stayed with her 11th husband, Lenny DiCicco, the father of her youngest son, for 15 years until his death at 86, saying it lent some stability to her life.

Recently, she married husband number 12, Jim Haupt.

“Jim feels like the first time I’ve ever been married in my life, because now I’m well and we make decisions for all the right reasons. Anything in the past is simply an experience I can’t undo,” said Owens.

Haupt is with her at most performances, helping her set up equipment and watching quietly from the audience. He cited “the three C’s,” as the secret behind their successful relationship.

“Communicate, compromise and cuddle. But cuddle really means doing things together, being together,” said Haupt.

Owens began to create a space for herself within the senior community. She entered Ms. Senior America beauty pageant in her early 60s because she “wanted to do something with (her) life.” She won the title in Massachusetts in 2007, reigning as queen for that whole year.

“I wasn’t the same person anymore,” said Owens.

In later years, Owens would also be named Ms. Maine in 2011 and Ms. Rhode Island in 2015.

Following her crowning achievements, Owens said she sometimes fields questions from other women who are on the fence about competing in Senior America pageants. Often, they are intimidated about the talent portion, saying they cannot sing or dance.

“I tell them, you just need to be the best person you know how to be. … not that you’re not going to fail, not that you’re going to have a bad day. Or not that you shouldn’t have a day where you have a pity party,” said Owens. “Some days, you just want to feel sorry for yourself. But then, you get over it and you move on. You don’t stay there.”

Fran Owens sings for the residents of Mary Ann Morse Healthcare Center in Natick on Dec. 7, 2018.

Soon after winning the state pageant, Pamela Kiriaji, a close friend, took some photos of Owens and wrote up a resume, in hopes of getting her friend more attention. The pair first crossed paths in 2006 when Kiriaji was a passenger on the Horizon’s Edge Casino Cruises for Seniors in Lynn, where Owens was performing.

“I made about 200 flyers and sent them to all the senior centers,” said Kiriaji, of Lynn. “She wanted to work (and) I wanted to help. It started to get her busy. Everything was going up and up and up.”

“Invite this Vibrant Versatile and Talented Lady to your facility,” reads a version of the flyer, the edges dotted with dozens of small red hearts. “Once you’ve seen her, you won’t forget her, EVER!”

Owens was caught off guard by Kiriaji’s promotional campaign.

“All of a sudden, I’m getting calls from these places and I don’t know why, she didn’t tell me. They said, ‘Yeah, we got your flyer’ – and I’m thinking, what flyer? – ‘and we’d love for you to come,’” said Owens.

She hit the senior center circuit hard, loading her Baskin-Robbins pink car up with makeup, speakers and a disc player and driving all over New England. She gets paid on a sliding scale based on what a facility can afford.

In late January, she made her second stop at the Wingate Residences, an assisted living facility in Haverhill. Rob Close, the activity director, said Owens, who performed at the facility in late January, naturally pulls people in.

“She’s over the top in just the right way – that it’s silly yet sincere,” said Close. “It’s almost Las Vegas showmanship, larger-than-life, but at the same time you know she’s just here to have fun,” said Close.

During performances, Owens snakes in and out of crowds of residents expertly, wireless microphone in hand. If she sees someone’s mouth moving, she’s there in a moment, wrapping an arm around them and comforting them through a few lines of song.

“You know, it’s a big deal to them. Even if they just got to sing a little bit of ‘Zippity Doo Dah’ or ‘Hail, Hail, the Gang’s all here,’” said Owens. “It just makes their day.”

Nursing home workers say energetic, colorful performances like hers can have a powerful impact on the residents, where music is often used to help patients cope through trauma.

Studies show that the relationship between music and memory is powerful, with music tapping the parts of the brain that control emotion. Close called it “the single greatest thing” residents have, saying the old songs Owens sings often conjure up fond memories of being with friends or meeting a partner.

When she visited Haverhill, Owens did not earn the biggest round of applause. But appreciation came from a quiet resident who used to perform in a choir, said Close.

“We just heard her belting out all of a sudden. We had never heard that resident so loud before,” said Close. “But Fran has that within her. She just knows how to make people feel comfortable.”

About half of all nursing home residents have major depression, approximately twice that of those in adult day services centers (24 percent) or residential care communities (25 percent), according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

A 2018 study by the Gerontology Institute of the John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy and Global Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston found that 31.5 percent of the state’s residents ages 65 or older have been treated for depression, up from 28.6 percent three years ago.

Owens said she hopes her songs help combat some of that loneliness.

“When you go to a nursing home, a lot of people don’t have anybody. They might get a relative once a week, they might not. They might have somebody come by with a dog, they might not,” said Owens. “So, I see the people who are lonely. The people who nobody goes to visit. The people who just don’t have anyone.”

At 75 and with a second wind as a performer, Owens said she feels like she finally found a place where she fits in.

“I wouldn’t want to hide anything. This was my life. I’m not going to make excuses for my life. It is what it is,” she said.

Back at Natick’s Mary Ann Morse Healthcare Center, Owens’ set was coming to an end. Soon she’d be packing up her speakers and turning her microphone off, but first she turned to the audience to say goodbye.

“I want to thank you so much for having me as your guest. God bless you all. Thank you. Yours truly, Fran Owens. Goodbye for now.”

Zane Razzaq can be reached at 508-626-3919 or zrazzaq@wickedlocal.com and on Twitter at @zanerazz.

Fran Owens smoothes her husband Jim Haupt's hair before leaving their home in Stoneham on January 14, 2019.
Fran Owens drives her shopping cart at Market Basket in Stoneham on January 14, 2019.
Fran Owens puts on her coat before leaving her home in Stoneham on January 14, 2019.