Singing doctor-to-be: Christina Lucas, a 1994 Chesterton High School graduate, will be on hand at tonight’s Hometown Christmas Parade to sign autographed copies of her just-released compact disc, “Christmas with Christi.” On Sunday, she’ll return to Erie, Penn., where she’s a second-year medical school student. (Photo by Vicki Urbanik)

By VICKI URBANIK

It’s one thing for a college student to release a holiday recording that’s being promoted as one of the “most unusual Christmas CDs in years.”

It’s quite another thing for that student to put together the disc in about a month after only two rehearsals with two other musicians she never knew before.

But add to that a few other details – that the young woman, a music school graduate, cut the CD while in med school, that she runs a cosmetic business on the side, that she’s fluent in Greek and Spanish, and that as an infant she was expected to grow up deaf and developmentally disabled – and you’ve got the makings of an unusual tale.

“I’m the sequel to ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding’,” said Christina Lucas. “My whole life has been nothing but serendipity.”

Lucas, a 1994 Chesterton High School graduate and daughter of Dr. Owen and Labrine Lucas, is the talent behind “Christmas with Christi,” now available for $15 at the Lakeshore Café and the Chesterton Train Station, and on line at www.christmaswithchristi.com. The CD is being promoted by the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, where she’s a second-year med school student and vice-president of the OB/GYN club.

The 14-song CD is a mix of styles, with a reggae version of “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” a Greek adaptation of “Feliz Navidad,” and an a capello of “Carol of the Birds,” which she sang in the CHS Madrigal Dinner.

Lucas said she wanted to make a Christmas CD to show how music, like medicine, can be a healing force.

Those two passions – music and medicine – have dominated Lucas’ life, sometimes tumultuously at that. Lucas has found herself at both extremes, giving up medicine to pursue music and vice versa, before finding a way to balance both callings.

The story of “Christmas with Christi” best begins as Lucas began it: At about seven weeks old, she contracted bacterial meningitis and was expected to be disabled and most likely deaf throughout her life. The morning she was to get a shunt to drain fluid from her brain, her teary mother looked down at her baby, already prepped for the surgery in the Chicago hospital.

“I gave her this big, beautiful smile.”

The doctors gave baby Lucas one final check and determined that she didn’t need the shunt after all. They sent her home. She would be just fine. “By the grace of God, I have perfect pitch,” Lucas said, clearly still amazed at her humble beginnings.

Growing up in Chesterton, she began playing piano at age 4 and sang “Tomorrow” from the musical Annie almost daily for her neighbors. At CHS, she was involved in a variety of musical events and groups.

After graduation, she wanted to study pre-med at Indiana University. But a school advisor urged her to follow her heart, and that appeared to be in music.

So she enrolled in the IU School of Music, where she stayed until 1996. “I got fed up singing just opera,” she said. Upon the advice of another counselor, she enrolled at Western Michigan University. Everything at her new school was wonderful, she said, until she met a “nice Greek boy” and fell madly in love.

Lucas decided she would uproot her life for him, switch from getting a music education degree to a bachelor’s so she could finish college one year earlier, get married and have kids.

It didn’t work that way. Five days before she left for coursework in Greece, she and her sweetheart suddenly broke up. She was devastated.

When she returned from Greece, she acted “on a whim” and auditioned for the university’s prestigious Gold Company Program. Though not at all prepared for the rigorous audition, she ended up one of only eight who made the company, which sent her to Australia, New Zealand and Fuji for performances.

After graduating with honors, Lucas started selling Mary Kay cosmetics, as she continues to do today, and working for a Kalamazoo radio station, where she was the top salesperson selling 15,000 packages with ease.

But she was hopelessly unhappy.

“I felt like Jerry McGuirre,” she said. “Nothing was going right. This wasn’t me.”

Then, “it just hit me.” The lesson she learned from the unexpected break-up with her boyfriend was that maybe she wasn’t in control of everything. She knew then that she wanted to pursue a profession that teaches honesty, humility and patience, and that was the medical profession, her original career goal.

“I had to start all over again,” Lucas said.

Moving back to Chesterton, she enrolled in the pre-med program at Indiana University Northwest in January, 2000 while volunteering at Porter Memorial Hospital. She finished her pre-med work after just 1 1/2 intense years, took her Medical College Admissions Test with “less-than-stellar” results, tutored IUN students, worked as an EKG technician, and continued volunteering at PMH.

At this point in her life, she devoted every ounce of energy to her studies and work, with no creative outlet. But the singing bug soon took hold. Acting on another whim, she auditioned with the Fourth Street Theater in Chesterton for a “It’s a Grant Night for Singing.”

At the same time, she secured an interview with the Lake Erie College of Osteopathic Medicine, one of the last steps before admittance. Doing what might be unthinkable, she rescheduled her interview since it conflicted with opening night at the theater.

During her interview at LECOM the following Monday -- where she eschewed the all-black power suits of every other candidate by wearing a grey sweater and long plaid skirt -- Lucas went over all her medical experience. Then she mentioned she was in a musical just that weekend. Her interviewers “perked up all of a sudden.”

“I was the only candidate with a music major,” she said.

A few weeks later, right around Thanksgiving, Lucas got the acceptance letter she was hoping for. “I fell to my knees. That was the happiest day of my life.”

She moved to Erie in the summer of 2002, determined that “this time, nothing is going to get in my way.” Once again, she poured all her energies into her studies, though she and a fellow med student did get the chance to sing at a few school events.

But once again, she was starting to get bored and frustrated. “I was starting to get edgy,” she said. Though she didn’t fall into a depression like some other med students, she knew “I needed my music.”

She then had “three huge moments of serendipity.”

Acting “on the fly,” she started talking voice lessons from a teacher, Sharon Burawa, who gave her unprecedented vocal freedoms. “She gave me so much confidence to sing again,” Lucas said. This past September, she told a music store in Erie that she was looking for a keyboard teacher and was given the name of a music producer, Trevor Huster. She gave Huster a demo CD (she always keeps a demo with her) and got a call a few days later. The two of them came up with the idea of putting out a Christmas CD.

But she didn’t yet have a band.

One night, while studying in her customary booth at an Erie diner, where she typically studies from 9 p.m. to 3 a.m., she took off her headphones for “a brief moment” and overhead a man talking about playing keyboard.

She asked him if he wanted to help her make a Christmas CD and gave him a demo. He called her the next morning.

The musician, Harry Honard, a percussionist, brought keyboardist Mark Alpaugh to their first rehearsal. The three meshed perfectly. “It was like we were together for years.”

After just one more rehearsal, the three had two recording sessions and finished “Christmas with Christi” in time for this season.

Is music beginning to lure her away from medicine again? She shook her head. She said she loves getting decked out in scrubs and working in a hospital, viewing the medical field as a calling from a higher power. Working on the CD, she said, “gave me an incentive to work harder.” She found that if she devoted the time for her studies during the day, she rewarded herself by singing at night.

Lucas said she can envision becoming a doctor or teaching medicine, while taking a few breaks here and there to record CDs. But she also said she’s not making any concrete plans, since her life so far has been “one big surprise after another.”

“I don’t know what God has in store for me,” she said. “I don’t know where this is going to take me.”

Posted 11/28/2003