“I’m Lester.”

And if you call Lester Senter Wilson anything else she probably won’t answer. Call it determination, stubbornness, whatever, but she hasn’t acknowledged her birth name, Mary Lester, since she was a child. Forget it. She has.

She’s an opera star who grew up in Shreveport and lives in Jackson. She has a voice with a tremendous range on the musical scales.

What her lips don’t say her eyes do. They might reflect a bit of mischief, laughter, joy and happiness, occasional sorrow, possibly even disdain.

“I like to be funny,” she admits. “I want to come back as a comedian in my next life.”

Her father sang tenor and hoped for a career in opera in New York only to end up with a hot dog, papaya juice and a ticket to the Met before he headed home. It was a hard road to travel, so he was probably thinking of his own disappointment when he said he didn’t want his daughter to pursue such a career. But Lester paid him no mind, and in the years since she has appeared with leading opera companies, in festivals and symphonies across America, in Canada and Europe.

Her versatile repertoire of more than 60 operatic roles includes a career of theater, vocal and symphonic accomplishments.

She’s done just about everything except Broadway, “but maybe it’s not too late.”

She’s worked on “The Broads of Broadway,” an hourlong show of some of the greatest tunes from the New York stage. She’ll give the maiden performance Thursday at 6 p.m. in the chapel of the Southern Cultural Heritage Center on Crawford Street as part of the Hobbs Freeman Arts & Nature Celebration. She’ll sing songs that have made starlets into stars, “people you will know, songs you will have heard.”

But back to the name: Why Lester?

Her father’s sister, Matt Lester, was the first violinist in the Dallas Symphony “and he was crazy about her.” In Florida he had a cousin, John Lester, who made orange wine and grapefruit champagne and taught Lester’s father how to swim by tying a rope around his middle and casting him into a pond.

“It made a great impression on my father, as you can imagine,” she said. “He did learn to swim — and he had a great affinity for the name Lester, and when I was born his brothers and sisters said you cannot name this little girl Lester, so they tacked on Mary,” but she’s never liked it, and she’s never used it.

Her first solo performance was when she was 5 years old, and she doesn’t remember what it was, “but I was accompanied by this beautiful woman with red hair and she played the harp and I thought she was some kind of angel or something, and I was transformed.”

That’s when she decided she wanted to sing, but her father never let her take voice lessons until the summer when she went away to college.

“As a result I’ve been thrown out of more voice studios than anybody else in creation because they didn’t know what to do with me,” she said. “I couldn’t sing high, I couldn’t sing low. I didn’t know what to sing and they didn’t know how to teach me.”

So it took her a long time to get around to singing, but she had a trump card: she had been taking piano lessons since she was 4, “so obviously I could play the piano better than I could sing.”

In her youth in Shreveport she sang in the choir at the Presbyterian church, and after high school she enrolled in the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Cleveland, Ohio, — “the coldest place in the world” for a Southern girl. From there she went to the Mozarteum University of Salzburg in Austria and was invited to live with an Austrian family.

She played bridge, but, “What I didn’t know was that when I played duplicate bridge with all those Austrian women who had traveled all over Europe playing, and they used to cuss me in German when I didn’t play the right card.” For her it was a very enlightening experience as “my German improved tremendously. My cuss words improved a lot.” She still speaks a bit of German, and her Austrian hosts remain close friends.

In Salzburg, she earned a certificate, then came home to earn a Master’s of Arts in piano performance from LSU, before enrolling at the University of Texas. That’s where she earned two doctorates, one in piano, the other in voice.

“Insanity” is what the program is called, she said. “You carry around a lot of books, you don’t sleep much, you practice a lot and you get a really good committee who thinks you’re the greatest thing since sliced bread,”

The entire episode was somewhat of a fluke. She had gone to Texas to study with a wonderful pianist and teacher, Skip Doppman. Another student (whose last name, ironically, was Lester) knew a voice teacher who needed an accompanist and she suggested Lester.

“Talk about synchronicity! I started playing for her and she said ‘Have you ever sung?’ and I said yes and she said ‘Sing for me,’” Lester recalled, “so when I sang for her she said ‘You’re going to be on my schedule.’”

There are right teachers for everybody in whatever field you’re in, Lester believes, “and she was the right teacher for me. She could tell me what was wrong and like a doctor knew how to fix it.”

Within three months she was singing the roles of the three heroines of the Italian composer Gioachino Rossini whose compositions were full of embellishments and “very Italian.” “His heroines were Cinderella, Ronina and Isabella,” she said.

“I was off and running,” Lester said. She had already done one opera, “a crazy thing that happened when I was teaching at Florida State and decided to audition for an opera in Orlando, trying out for the part of Martha, an old lady and a very funny character.”

The cast was unbelievably impressive — Beverly Sills, Placido Domingo, Norman Treigle, several others — and Lester. Sills thought Lester too young (she could have been her granddaughter), but she later said, after hearing Lester sing and play at a luncheon, “Oh, Lester, you should go to Broadway.”

Instead she went to Texas and earned double doctorates,

Lester is a mezzo soprano, and as such, she said, her favorite role has always been “the one I was doing at the moment. As a mezzo you play witches, bitches and boys. You play a witch like in Hansel and Gretel; bitches — you can be a charmer, very alluring, and sexy. And boys — at the time the operas were written they played boys. They also played maids and sweet young things. As a mezzo you play every kind of character. You may be a bird. I’ve been a dog, a chicken, and a cat.”

She never took acting or dancing, “but I’m blessed that I have a great love of characters. The most fun thing for me in singing is that you become somebody else,” and in the days when she was in opera much of the time “It would give me great pleasure if I went out into the hall afterward and nobody recognized me. I would study people and how they walked, how they moved.”

One of the highlights of her career was when she played Carmen with John Logan. He had wanted Beverly Sills for the part “but, of course, she couldn’t — she was past doing Carmen.”

Lester was sent to New York to play the role, she said, because Logan had a cousin in Shreveport, “and they didn’t have much money and was available.” When she met Logan he took one look and said “You’ll never do. You would look like apple pie,” but she told him, “Just give me a fluffy wig and a low-cut dress and I’ll convince you.”

She got the role and her opening line, “Hey, big man, you fresh meat?” had everybody falling on the floor laughing, so they cut that line, “and now I’ve forgotten what my entrance line was, but it wasn’t nearly as good as that one.”

“Makeup,” Lester said, “is a great thing,” which has enabled her to fit into whatever role she plays.

There have been moments when she’s forgotten the words (something she’d like to forget) so what does one do?

“Punt,” she said. “You do the best you can. I have to work like a Trojan to get it all into my brain and sometimes something comes out and I go, ‘what? Did I say that?’ but the show goes on though someone in the audience may laugh and say, ‘Did you hear what she said?’”

Though she’s primarily an opera singer, Lester sings just about everything else, for “When you live in Mississippi you have to do that.”

And she likes it that way.

To sing nothing but opera she would be constantly traveling, spending a great deal of time in Europe, then working her way up to an opera house such as the Met. She would have to learn five to 10 roles max and have them letter perfect, “never ever making a mistake, never, ever, ever, ever. You could never sing anything or anywhere else because you’re under contract.”

“And I’m not that kind of person,” she said.

As a result, the 11 CDs she’s recorded range from classical numbers to Civil War songs to hymns. One of those sessions was under the direction of Jerry Puckett who recorded Willie Nelson. Lester also has recorded with the Radio-Television Orchestra in Dublin, Ireland.

She’s sung so much and recorded so much, that when she recently ran across some music in her storeroom she found compositions she had forgotten.

“I said ‘holy Toledo! That certainly is a lot of music. Did I do that? Oh, my gosh, did I do that, too? Lawdy, Miss Claudy …’” Recently she had five different performances of as my different types of music, “but what fun! The same thing all the time, over and over? — Boring!”

One of her many roles isn’t on stage and isn’t singing. It’s working with the Shreveport Piano Competition, which was begun in 1950 by the late John Shenaut, then continued by his good friend Nina Wideman, who died in 1983, at which time Lester was named executive director “because I was the youngest kid on the block.”

Out of 80 to 120 students, 40 or 50 are chosen for the three-day event held the first weekend in December. Though some other competitions go on for several weeks, Lester feels that might be too much. The Shreveport Competition is one of the oldest and most prestigious for its size. Her goal, Lester said, in working with the young musicians is that she stresses professionalism, nurturing and she knows the necessity of teaching them how to audition.

“To have the best people in the world come to you without going after them — what an amazing thing, such a thrill — and to think that I might have something to share or to help them with, having been in the music business for a long time, and I come at it in a different way from most people, so maybe anything that I can do, to share with them on that rocky road — it’s such a blessing to me,”

Lester’s talents certainly have not gone unnoticed. In 2001 she won the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and in 2004 she was the recipient of the Mississippi Honored Artist Award from the National Museum of Women in Arts.

In researching the music for “The Broads of Broadway,” Lester said “You get it into your system, into your heart. You add a little prop, a little whipped cream, add a few steps, jazz it up a little. You get a costume, you put it all together and hope for the best.”

The show was the idea of her husband, Dick, “who knows every song that I have ever sung or probably ever will sing.”

She’s delved into the roles of the women, of their singing, their signature pieces, and she pondered, “Am I going to imitate them or am I going to be me? I have to do a little of both, but I have to really make the song mine and sell the song.”

“I’ve had a lot of fun putting the show together,” she said. “I’m excited!”

There was a smile in her voice, a sparkle in her eyes.

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Gordon Cotton is an author and historian who lives in Vicksburg.