Where are they now? 
Marleena Coulston
By Eliza Dousette

In the summer of 1999, Marleena Coulston graduated from Gorham High School and departed into the sunset for Whittier College in California.  While she may be gone, Gorham residents can never forget her—the beautiful and tiny girl with a booming voice to rival Aretha Franklin’s.

While friends and family were Coulston’s first captive fans, her audiences grew with many Village School and First Parish Congregational Church performances.  Her true debut came in 1992 when, at age 11, she was a featured singer at the “Gorham Days” summer festival.  The M.C. of the event was local songwriter Mike Nobel, and he was won over with the incredible voice coming out of such a young schoolgirl.

Working as a friend and mentor, Nobel helped Coulston burst onto the Maine music scene in 1993 with the WCSH Channel 6 “Color Me Green” environmental campaign, for which he was a songwriter.  Those who may have never met or heard Coulston personally might remember her crystal talent on the song “The Miracle of the Birds”  from this same campaign.  Nobel continued to help Coulston find opportunities to record and perform, and provided the groundwork for making her dreams become a reality.

By the time Coulston was in high school, she was a fixture at local performances, participating in choirs, the Gorham Chamber Singers, high school musicals and singing the national anthem at various Portland Pirates and Sea Dogs games.  At the high school, she worked with Darrell Morrow, her favorite piano accompanist from the First Parish Congregational Church and the vocal performance teacher.  “Darrel will always tick out in my mind,”  Coulston reveals.  “ He was the one who truly helped me to develop the confidence and musical skills needed to succeed in college and the real world.”

Coulston, the daughter of Vance and Gloria Coulston, became known in Gorham as “the singer,” which meant the world to her as it saved her from some of the other nicknames she had been forced to grow up with like the “blind girl,” and “the girl with the white hair.” Coulston was born with a genetic condition called albinism, which affects the pigmentation of the skin, eyes, and hair, causing vision loss and sensitivity to light.  Though Coulston has had to deal with the visual obstacles and social challenges associated with albinism, she has never let it keep her from pursuing her interests, education, or aspirations.

Coulston graduated from Whittier College in 2003 with high honors and a B.A. in Music-Vocal Performance.  With her degree in music, she left the Whittier College campus to delve into the “real world,” where she got a part time teaching job at a private elementary school/  Right out of college Coulston also started a life of regular gigs with Ramon and the LA Band, a cover band specializing in Motown hits—a perfect fit for a singer who constantly draws comparisons to the likes of Diana Ross and Chaka Khan.

While a life of helping children by day and gigs by night was a life that Coulston adored, she realized that she needed more to support herself than a part-time job and sporadic pay from the band.  So, she went back to a place that had helped her with her move to California, her schooling, and her mobility training—the Braille Institute in Anaheim,--and applied for a full time position.  “I want to be an example for others who have struggled with independence and maybe even given up on their dreams due to their vision loss/. I want to say to them, “Hey, if I can do it, you can do it.”

With a regular Monday through Friday job, Coulston was able to travel to Las Vegas this past season with her father to audition for “American Idol.”  The preliminary judges told her that she was a good singer, but she was not quite what they were looking for this past season.  The trip was not without merit, however, as Coulston’s photo graced the audition pages of the “American Idol” Web site for the entire season.

Coulston has great things already in store for her future.  First, and most important to her, on December 31, 2005, Coulston married her college sweet heart, Marc Barber, who is also a musician.  Then, as she was rehearsing this fall for her biggest musical role to date, as the Witch in Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods,” she was contacted by songwriter, Carol Roman, who was putting together a showcase of her own music and was looking for an R&B  singer for one particular song.  After two years of singing cover songs with the band, Coulston was ready to move on and start working on some new material to “discover what Marleena really sounds like.  Coulston learned in December, that Roman had forwarded a few of her songs to a Nashville songwriter who has provided songs to artists like the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears, and a vast assortment of A-list country singers.  After listening carefully to all of the songs, the two he marked as having the potential to be big hits were the two that Coulston had recorded.

While Coulston’s career and life have led her to California to pursue her ambitions, she has remembered everything that the town of Gorham provided her.  “Gorham offered me a very loving, supporting community that allowed me to develop my talents and the confidence needed to make it in the music world.  She said.  Nor will the residents of Gorham ever forget the tiny girl with a big voice, and ever bigger heart who continues to live out her dreams.