Worker serves up right note with those McDonald's fries
AKRON, Ohio — It’s not a traditional Happy Meal.
That’s because it’s geared to the refined tastes of an older customer like mom and dad, aunt and uncle and grandmother and grandfather.
Yet most of the customers inside Akron’s McDonald’s restaurant at 2021 E. Market St. are as delighted as little children with what’s being served with their early morning fast-food selections.
Not only that, it’s free.
It’s the music of Diana Anderson, the part-time hostess there for the last five years, who in addition to myriad predictable duties, shares her operatic singing voice with customers. Inarguably, a much more pleasing idea than “whistling while you work.”
Some insist they’re regulars because of her singing. A great way to start their day, they say.
The Akron woman — a hard-to-believe 71-year-old dressed in a navy ball cap with the McDonald’s “I’m lovin’ it” logo, coordinating red/white/blue polo shirt and dark trousers — has a classically trained voice.
“God has blessed me all of my life. There were three times when I almost died, and each time God pulled me through,” she said.
“The first was when I was 5 and living with an abusive foster family,” she said. “Because nobody believed me, I stepped in front of a semi and waited for it to run over me. But it didn’t happen. The woman next door who was the mother of my foster mother called my dad and I went to live with another family, the Schultzes, who were really an awesome match, with daughters Linda, Sissy and another one close to my age.”
In those days during World War II, Diana explained, it wasn’t uncommon for working parents like hers to pay other families to provide residential care for their children.
Her second near-death experience happened as she and her husband were returning from a recital at Penn State and were involved in a car crash: “A man in another car sped up, our bumpers locked, we went off the road and we rolled three times. We were in a brand new Rambler, which had no seat belts because they weren’t required back then.”
A third time was in the early ’70s when she became deathly ill with the London flu. “There was no room in the (Pittsburgh) hospitals, which were jammed full, even the hallways. I was so weak, I couldn’t walk and I had three young children at home at the time.”
“Prayer and singing have brought me through some really dark times!” she continued, including a recent brush with a precancerous condition. “I just want people to know that God truly cares about them.”
Divorced now, Diana — proud mother of five and grandmother of eight — carries with her a well-worn book of arias, “The Prima Donna’s Album,” from which she makes her selections to go with the fast-food menu.
“I sing mostly in the back so it doesn’t interfere with customers placing their orders or impinge on customers’ personal conversations,” Diana said.
On this day, her audience couldn’t have been more eclectic: three men discussing the Browns, a few tables of singles, seven Amish men who seemed quietly delighted as they placed their orders at the counter. “Zip A Dee Doo Dah” has a way of bringing joy to anyone’s ears.
Diana said she often wonders what her life would have been like had she pursued an operatic career. “But you make choices in life. I chose motherhood. For that, I have no regrets.”
