Willa Holt Wakefield

Willa Holt Wakefield (November 9, 1870 – June 3, 1946) was an American vaudeville performer. Wakefield told stories and recited in the "pianologue" style, and was billed as "the Lady of Optimism".

Early life and education Willa Holt was born in Cuthbert, Georgia, the daughter of Peyton Robert Holt and Harriet (Hattie) Missouri Platt Holt. Her father was a pharmacist and a Confederate States Army veteran of the American Civil War. She studied piano with Theodor Leschetizky. Career Wakefield taught school as a young woman. She was a pianologue on the vaudeville stage in the 1910s and 1920s. Her act featured sentimental, patriotic, humorous and nostalgic stories, recitations, and songs, presented with "elegance, refinement, self-control, and dignity". "She is quite the pleasantest entertainer one could wish for," noted a Detroit critic in 1909. In a 1917 interview, she explained her choice of material, saying "We very often move in a veritable mental mist in this sad old grumbling world, a thick mist of prejudice and irritability and hyper sensitiveness--and so we become more and more hypercritical ourselves. Yet, after all, it is a mist that can be easily dispelled by thrilling beams of mental sunshine."

Wakefield had a reputation for making shrewd investments, and owned a farm on Long Island as well as a home on New York's Riverside Drive. Personal life Wakefield married Vienna-born sculptor Arnold Frederick Foerster in 1915; they divorced in 1936. She died in 1946, in Los Angeles, at the age of 75.