Lakeside's Premier Performer.- A profile on the woman whose talents have made history here at Lakeside.

Most Lakesiders know Cindy Paul as a jazz singer and performer in musical comedies -- her most recent role being Sgt. Sarah Brown, the innocent Salvation Anny worker in the Little Theaters production of Guys and Dolls. However, few people are aware of how multifaceted are her skills. In addition to doing musical theatre, Cindy has sung Bachs B-Minor mass in a cathedral, given bell concerts in a campus carilion tower, played the piano since she was six, sung with a womens barbershop quartet. Her favorite forms of music, however, are the unlikely combination of blues, and Bach, each of which she sees as spiritually profound in its own way.

She gets a chance to sing blues, jazz and showtunes each week at the Sunday morning brunch at the Monte Carlo in Chapala. In addition to working as a performer, she is also an oil painter of considerable ability, a specialist in Tai Chi and other martial arts, and an admirer of Thoreau and Lao Tzu (whom she began studying as a teenager.)

For 12 years, she and her husband experienced a Thoreauvian life, living without electricity in an isolated cabin amidst the cows and coyotes on two and a half acres of land in the mountains near Chapala. More than 20 years ago, they decided they wanted to live a life that was free from the burdens of material possessions. "As a consequence," she explains, "though were not rich in material things, weve had the time to explore. We live modestly, and have the freedom to do what we love doing," she says of herself and her husband, Lonny Riddle.

"Weve heen married for 22 years, but because we have different last names, people always think weve been living in sin."

Shed like to live in sin -- on stage, at least, where her fresh and youthful look always gets her cast as some kind of innocent young thing. The die was cast at the age of six, when she first appeared on stage in the role of the Virgin Mary in a Christmas pageant. Ever since, she cant seem to escape from similar roles such as the young nun, Maria, in The Sound of Music, the ingenue Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, and most recently, as the naive Salvation Army worker in the recent production of Guys and Dolls.

Cindy is only 52 " and 112 pounds, but beneath her petite form lurks a tigress, with expertise in martial arts, and a courage to match. Cindy likes to tell of the time when she was alone in their isolated house and woke up hearing noises. She surprised a robber in the process of burglarizing their home. "I confronted him with a club, and spat out the warning, `No mueve! (Dont move!) He stood there terrified for 45 minutes until Lonnie returned."

Weekdays at the Monte Carlo, she and her husband give Tai Chi lessons to groups of Lakesiders. "Its a great form of exercise for older people, kind of like a moving form of meditation. It makes you think, so your mind becomes rejuvenated. You exercise your spine in a way that breaks down calcifications, and the motions are slow so that you cant injure yourself. The first lesson is free," she advertises, "and we teach Monday, Wednesday and Saturday at 10 in the morning." They plan to develop a Spanish-language videotape teaching Tai Chi. Cindy is also working up a repetoire for a CD in Spanish of traditional jazz and blues songs.

Soon, she and Lonnie hope to do a retum engagement of the play Greater Tuna, in which they play the parts of 20 different characters of both sexes. "We may not be rich, but we are doing just exactly what we want to do. We are lucky enough to be living our dreams."

(Ed. Note: From all accounts, Guys and Dolls was one of the best, most commercially successful plays ever done by the Little Theater. We here at Lakeside are indeed lucky that such a marvelous performer as Cindy graces so many of our local productions.)