From Doo-Wop Singer to Bus Driver to Rutgers Resident Assistant and Student
After adventure and fame, Marilyn Ali is pursuing her dream of a college degree at age 65
'All of the performing, the travel to places like New Zealand, the dressing up – I knew there was something missing in my life. I always wanted to go to school.'– Marilyn Ali
She sang with reconstituted versions of the Crystals (“He’s a Rebel,” “Da Doo Ron Ron”) and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers (“Why Do Fools Fall in Love?”). Her venues included Carnegie Hall, Madison Square Garden and Harlem’s Apollo Theater; Queen Elizabeth II was once in her audience.
Rutgers senior Marilyn Ali is singing a different tune these days, serving as a resident assistant in Sophia House at Douglass Residential College while wrapping up her final semesters as a communications major – at the age of 65.
The zigzag in her career path finds her studying side-by-side with students she once ferried around Rutgers-New Brunswick as a driver on Rutgers’ EE bus route.
“All of the performing, the travel to places like New Zealand, the dressing up – I knew there was something missing in my life,” Ali says. “I always wanted to go to school. It wasn’t enough to graduate from high school.”
The second of nine children born to a single mother in the Bronx, Ali followed a twisting route after leaving Benjamin Franklin High School in Manhattan, now the Manhattan Center for Science and Mathematics.
Although she worked on and off in banking, first as a teller and then as a customer service rep, the performing bug bit early and hard. And so she began auditioning for groups, memorizing pop lyrics of the ‘60s and ‘70s to serve as her signature repertoire.
During the late 1980s, she tried out for a new group called The Teenagers, an offshoot of the band once led by Lymon, whose single, “Why Do Fools Fall in Love,” helped launch the doo-wop sensation that had swept the nation three decades earlier.
Five years or so into that gig, Ali was backstage with the group at Radio City Music Hall when she was approached by Delores Kenniebrew, the only original member of the Crystals still performing with the group.
One of their singers was pregnant and about to give birth, and Kenniebrew said: Would Ali like to travel to Europe in her stead?
Would she ever!
The ensuing trip found the group entertaining England’s reigning monarch at a garden party which featured the Crystals offering up their own hits as well as covers by the Pointer Sisters.
During a New Zealand tour with her new colleagues, Ali was recruited once again, this time for the Southern Hemisphere’s version of the musical “Hair,” which was already rocking audiences in the states.
Returning home in 1997, she said goodbye to the touring life and began producing CDs for the now-defunct Tower Records. One of them was her own – “I Kan’t Hold On,” which featured 10 songs, five of which she had written. Autobiographical in nature, the songs were primarily ballads; one, “Never Give Up,” got play on a New York radio station.
A second CD, featuring contemporary gospel, followed in 2009.
Around this time, two changes would take place that helped define Ali’s next chapter. Although she’d spent decades working at banks to finance her entertainment dreams, she left that field in favor of a job driving a bus route at Rutgers, and she joined the Abundant Life Family Church in New Brunswick.
Both moves brought her into contact with Rutgers students and professors, interactions that nourished another long-held dream: pursuing higher education.
Ali, by then living in North Plainfield, began by earning her associate’s degree in elementary education from the University of Phoenix, before applying to the state university.
“I was already growing, heading in a direction that’s positive, and I kept hearing about Rutgers, what a good college it is,” Ali says. “Then I heard it was one of the best performing arts schools in the nation, and that it was known internationally, and I was hooked.”
After completing her first year studying voice at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Ali declared communications as her major and theater arts her minor. On track to receive her bachelor’s degree in May, she is weighing graduate school, possibly in social work.
At Douglass, she is part of the Mary Bunting Program for Non-Traditional Students, which brings together a community of women who, like Ali, have followed a non-conventional path on the way to earning their degrees.
These days, her performing includes belting out classical music in the Neilsen Dining Hall on the Douglass campus, as well as singing with the church choir.
But she’s not ready to turn the page on her musical career.
After more than a decade, Ali recently reconnected with Jimmy Merchant of The Teenagers, who is still performing and who invited the singer to join him on the road for the occasional gig.
She agreed, but only if Merchant can guarantee she’ll be back on campus for her 9:50 a.m. Monday class, “Introduction to Formal Reasoning.”
Media contact: Carla Cantor, ccantor@ucm.rutgers.edu, 848-932-0555