Commentary: She started teaching music at Santa Monica school in 1971 and can't leave because 'it feeds me'

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In more ways than one, this is a love story, and it begins in 1970.Paul Cummins, headmaster of a Santa Monica elementary school called St.Augustine-by-the-Sea, was in the market for a music teacher and a colleague suggested he call a Rustic Canyon pianist named Mary Ann.Mary Ann wasn’t interested in the job but agreed to host a get-together at her home and introduce Cummins to two teachers.

But Cummins didn’t want the other two.He wanted Mary Ann.“I’ve just seen the best teacher I’ve ever seen in my life,” he told a friend after visiting Mary Ann and hearing about her teaching techniques.Cummins talked Mary Ann into taking the job, and before long, she joined the faculty of a brand-new middle school Cummins co-founded by the name of Crossroads.That was in 1971.But 1972 was a year of new beginnings, too.

That was the year Paul and Mary Ann got married.Fifty-five years later, Mr.and Mrs.

Cummins live together in the house where they met.And Mary Ann is still teaching at Crossroads, among other places.“She’s 93 and she’s got the energy of a teenager,” Paul Cummins, 88, said of his wife.

“She’s kind of a freak of nature.”Veteran protester Bert Voorhees, 70, says democracy is on the line and it’s time to march.I can attest to that after spending several hours with her on Tuesday, hustling to keep up as she taught at two schools and then hurried home to greet her private students.At St.Anne School in Santa Monica, I watched Cummins harness the squirmy energy of second-graders wielding xylophone mallets.

She’s been using the Orff Schulwerk Approach for decades, in which students create music in something of a percussion-driven jamboree of singing, dancing and moving.“Two, three, four,” Cummins counted down, and her eager little ensemble broke into song: “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.”When the session was done, Cummins, wh...