Chelsea Martin, a 15-year-old Marengo area resident and student at Kindersley Composite School, will display her musical and vocal talents during the live Kinsmen Telemiracle broadcast scheduled for March 2-3 at TCU Place in Saskatoon.
Kenneth Brown
of The Clarion
A Marengo area youth attending Kindersley Composite School (KCS) is about to take her musical talents to perform live during the annual Kinsmen Telemiracle.
Chelsea Martin, 15, is scheduled to perform during the 24-hour Kinsmen Telemiracle on March 3 at 10:57 a.m. The young performer is playing and singing a cover of Folsom Prison Blues written by country and western icon Johnny Cash during the broadcast.
Martin is also performing next week on Feb. 12 at the annual Talent Night Telemiracle with other KCS and Elizabeth Middle School students. All proceeds from the local talent night are donated to the Kinsmen Telemiracle. The fundraiser takes place at the Norman Ritchie Community Centre at 7:30 p.m.
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It will not be the first time Martin has performed during the Telemiracle broadcast, but it will be the first time she has performed by herself. She sang with a group of students from Westcliffe Composite School in 2016.
The 15-year-old performer said she has only been playing guitar for a little more than a year now, but she played the ukulele before picking up the guitar. She said she got bored with the ukulele a bit, so she decided to challenge herself by playing the guitar.
Martin also plays the clarinet and she performed in the Saskatchewan Honour Band in November. She said the selection process for Telemiracle starts by sending an email to describe the act, and then the performers get a reply to the email if the selection panel wants them to attend an audition.
Auditions are held in Saskatoon and Regina, so Martin went to Saskatoon in November for her audition. She said the auditions are quick, but performers have to answer various questions asked by the selection panel. It is a whirlwind experience.
“You get really nervous, you go on stage, you do your audition, and then you have to talk to strangers about it,” she said, recognizing that there is no way to prepare for the panel’s questions even though she was expecting them.
Martin said she knew the panel asked questions from her audition with the singing group from Westcliffe, but the teacher answered the questions and this time it was up to her to do it. The acceptance email came just before Christmas, but it was at a time when she could not read it.
She noted that she was in an English class when she got the message from Telemiracle, so she had to wait until the class was over to read it. She said people who audition get a message whether they are accepted or not, so she was eager to read the message.
“As soon as the bell rang, I was on my phone reading the email,” Martin said, recognizing that it took a minute to learn if she was accepted because it was a wordy message. “When I was texting my mom about it, I was super excited.”
Martin said she has performed at talent nights in front of small audiences, so she is really excited to perform during a live television broadcast with lots of people watching both on television and on stage inside TCU Place.
There are a lot of lights on the performers, so it is hard to see people in the live audience, she said. Martin hits the stage just before 11 a.m. on the second day of the Telemiracle broadcast, and she said she is glad she does not have to perform at 4 a.m. The late-night slots are reserved for older performers.
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