“Up until a dozen years ago, Marilyn Cramer played the French horn in the Johnstown Symphony,” writes Jeremy Reynolds in Sunday’s (9/17) Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Now, Ms. Cramer is 85 years old and uses a wheelchair. A resident at Orion Personal Care Residence in Hampton, she has dementia and Parkinson’s disease. A recent stroke has further limited her ability to speak. On Saturday, Ms. Cramer attended the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s annual gala, thanks to the Dream Foundation, an organization dedicated to fulfilling the end-of-life dreams of terminally ill adults with less than a year to live. ‘We wanted to do something special for her,’ said Brandi Bankston, administrator of Orion Personal Care Home.… ‘She doesn’t vocalize much, but when we told her that we were taking her to the symphony she lit up the room with the biggest smile.’ ” The Dream Foundation states that it honors “requests to spend an evening at the symphony, the opera or the theater fairly often.… Michael Walther, executive director of the Johnstown Symphony, said Ms. Cramer first played the French horn with the symphony in 1957 and except for a break of a couple of years in the 1970s, played through the 2005-06 season.”
Posted September 20, 2017
