If 35 years ago you were between the ages of 3 and 12, or the parent of such a child, chances are you remember Carole Demas and Paula Janis, the stars of “The Magic Garden.” It was a highly acclaimed TV show that enjoyed a 12 1/2 -year run and was the favorite of millions of children in the ”™70 and ”™80s ”“ a precable era when having one”™s own show was to be the top of the entertainment mountain.
Demas sang and Janis sang and played the guitar and while it entertained, the show also wove lessons in language, culture and the arts so seamlessly into scripts that children watching may have had no idea they were learning something until many years later.
Many years later, this team is still together, having worked steadily performing their timeless material in schools, museums and cultural centers in addition to performing separately. Demas has starred on Broadway, on TV and in concert and Janis has performed as a folk singer and stage entertainer.
One of the delights about interviewing Demas and Janis is the spirit and passion with which they talk about their hobbies as well as their professions.
Demas cannot seem to get out of the garden. Together with husband Stuart, she toils the three acres of earth that surround the house in Irvington that Stuart designed. The yard includes a ¾-acre pond. The garden includes a couple of hundred trees. There is one big oak that she says goes right to her heart every time she looks at it.
Demas estimates that there are about 40-plus kinds of shrubs, 60 kinds of flowering perennials, 20-plus varieties of hosta, numerous wild plants, and eight different beds of herbs. She has more than 60 large containers of annuals, not counting smaller pots, with some three-dozen different kinds of plants grown for flowers or foliage.
Her biggest challenges: shade, clay soil, tree roots and all sorts of “wild critters.” The heavy soil and rocks mean tackling areas with a pickax. Chopping down her own Christmas tree becomes more and more of a challenge very year. “We”™re getting older and hauling it is getting tougher,” she says laughing. Demas”™ garden sports a number of bird feeders, evidence of her love of animals, which range from spiders to elephants. (She has a turtle who has been her friend for 45 years.)
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“In my garden, the textures, smells, colors, sounds, the mud and the challenges all nourish my artistic voice in a very personal way,” Demas says. “I am in touch with my body, mind and soul and that is essential to the development of my craft as an actor and singer.”
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Demas also likes to cook and used to cook a great deal, but confesses she”™d rather be covered with mud than with spaghetti sauce. Along with her intense interest in gardens trees and animals, she is dedicated to working in the community to save open space and especially trees. Demas also lists her many charity performances among her passions. “They are done for the love of singing, the desire to help and the satisfaction of contributing something where it is needed,” she says.
Janis cannot get enough of traveling to far away places.
“I”™ve had the traveling bug every since my parents took me on a grand tour of Europe when I was 15,” says Janis. She continues to expand her interest in music and education in each location she visits. When she began to play the guitar in college, she collected folk songs in foreign languages and used them as part of her act.
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She has studied Flamenco guitar in Spain, and sung French folk songs on the streets of the Left Bank in Paris.
She incorporated singing into her classrooms, first when she became a teacher and then later in “The Magic Garden.” Greeting the audience in different languages every day and singing songs from different lands helped make that show a big hit.
She has been on a photo safari in Africa, accompanied the University of Tokyo English Club on a tour of a Shinto shrine so they could practice their English, climbed to the top of Machu Picchu, the Lost City of the Incas in Peru, driven a dog sled on the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska, and ridden down the Great Wall of China in a toboggan. On a boat ride down the Amazon River, she discovered a little elementary school where she and the children sang songs to each other in Spanish. Janis “adopted” the school and since 2005 she has arranged to give the children their school supplies every year. She claims she never grows tired of seeing new places and learning new things.
That same passion for traveling also manifests itself in her devotion to education. Whether she is standing on a stage, in a classroom or on TV, she tries to create that atmosphere of learning, participation and understanding that she experiences when she travels. She has also performed for numerous charities.
Both women agree that their performances have been enhanced by the creative energy with which they indulge their passions. Neither one can ever remember being bored in her entire life.
