Senior class activities at Cherry Creek High School kept Chelsea Magness from devoting the amount of time she should have spent practicing hunter-jumper maneuvers on Queenie, Cover Girl, Little Prince and Back in a Flash, the four Warmbloods she rides in equine competitions across the nation. And that, she explained, is why she was dumped three times in five days during an Albuquerque horse show held in early June.
Fortunately, she escaped serious injury, but the mishaps landed her in a back brace and made movement so painful that she could move around only with the aid of a walker.
No one would have blamed her for calling in sick for the opening of the Central City Opera’s 74th season on June 24. She was one of the 14 Flower Girls to be presented that night in the Teller House garden, a rite that includes descending 60-some steps that lead to the wooden deck on which the honorees and their escorts stand.
Where there’s a will there’s a way, though, and so the granddaughter of the late telecommunications pioneer Bob Magness patiently sat on a bench on the deck until emcee Ed Nichols called her name. She then stood, took the arm of her escort, Alex Kjellsen, and took about three steps forward to join the others in the semi-circle they had formed.
The Flower Girl presentation was followed by the traditional Yellow Rose Waltz on Eureka Street in front of Central City’s historic opera house. A Kevin Taylor dinner served in the Teller House preceded a performance of “The Ballad of Baby Doe.”
Magness was one of two accomplished horsewomen in the 2006 Flower Girl class. Kaytlyn Jornayvaz recently added Ghost to her stable and will be training the steed at Columbine Equestrian Center this summer. One of her horses will accompany her to Dallas this fall when she enters Southern Methodist University as a Distinguished Scholar in the honors business program.
While Magness was recuperating from her injuries, Flower Girl cousins Lauren Schaefer and Lily Schlosser were being innoculated for their summer trip to Africa, where they’ll deliver medical supplies to AIDS clinics in Zambia. Schaefer, daughter of Mary Bryson Schaefer and Frederic Michelsen Schaefer Jr., was graphics editor of the Kent Denver yearbook. She’s an award-winning photographer and will major in English at Colorado College. Schlosser, a graduate of Colorado Academy, was co-editor of the school’s literary magazine and spent last summer at Oxford University in England, studying creative writing.
Kedzie Schotters, daughter of Colorado Symphony Orchestra trustee Barney Schotters and his wife, Nancy, a past president of the Junior League, spent one month during each of the past two summers in Tanzania and Ecuador, where she did community service work that included building classrooms for a school. She co-founded Kent’s Beyond Our Borders Club, sang with Sorella, the girls’ a cappella choir, and was a member of the varsity dance team.
Caroline Butler asked Teddy Scott, with whom she has been friends since she was 2, to be her escort. He came to the job knowing just what to do, having served as Flower Girl Maria Naves’ escort in 2005. His parents, Ellen and Don Scott, are longtime supporters of the Central City Opera and have been friends with Caroline’s parents, Sam and the late Betty Butler, for many years.
Kelly Buntmann, whose aunt, Marnie King, is one of the founding members of the Central City Opera Guild, also was a Flower Girl; her mom, Mary Buntmann, chaired the guild’s major fundraiser, L’Esprit de Noel, in 2002. Honoree Alex Harding’s mother, Vicki Henry Harding, chaired L’Esprit in 2006.
Other Flower Girls were Madeline Caudle, who’ll be pre-med at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y.; Carter Grey, who’ll spend the summer as a camp counselor in North Carolina, teaching kayaking and canoeing; Katie Loiseau, who appeared in numerous musicals at Kent and whose mother, Meegan Carey, and cousin, Nancy Harrington, were Flower Girls; Madeline Morrissey, daughter of Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey; Patty Pogge, who’d been valedictorian and co-president of the Mullen High student body; and Sarah Wyman, who graduated with highest academic honors from Cherry Creek High and will study music at the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami in Coral Gables.
Society editor Joanne Davidson can be reached at 303-809-1314 or jmdpost@aol.com.
