When the Gay & Lesbian Times located the peripatetic dynamo named Shola Cole, she’d been on the road with Stomp for about eight months.

“I’m in Augusta, Georgia, I am, I am,” she said with a chuckle. Shola is an empowered 29-year-old engaged in living, loving and performing.

She was born in England to a Nigerian father and a Caribbean-bred (Antigua) mother. When her parents split up, Shola and her younger brother moved with their mother, a surgical nurse, to Connecticut.

“I started playing piano when I was about 6,” Shola says. “I began trombone when I was 15 – because there were no more saxophones. They ran out of saxophones. I took to trombone right away, just loved it. Especially being a girl, it’s such a good instrument to have.”

She didn’t do much band marching until she got to the University of Connecticut, which she refers to as UConn. “The piano brought me other places, but the trombone made me a lot more social. For example, I traveled with the women’s basketball pep band at UConn, saw them win their first national championship.”

A music major, Shola played in the UConn symphonic band and jazz ensemble, all the while, “like, taking piano lessons.” She also started a women’s brass ensemble called Brass Behavior and sang with an a cappella ensemble called Rubyfruit, after Rita Mae Brown’s book, Rubyfruit Jungle.

“In addition to mainstream venues, we sang in all these wonderful, socially-conscious venues. That was the first time I didn’t have a trombone or piano in front of me. In a way, I was just kinda nekkid.” Though she felt exposed and audience-vulnerable, she was able to perform and felt it was quite natural.

Shola first saw Stomp in 1994 at UConn. “I helped load in the show because I worked as an assistant stage hand. I was able to watch the show after finishing all my work. I said, ‘The next time I see this show, I’m going to be in it.’”

Ten years went by and one day, while noodling around on the web, Shola saw that Stomp was forming a new company in Boston. She and her partner, Jessie, motored up there in a beat-up Volvo on its last legs.

“It was full circle for me. Two or three Stompers taught us a hands-and-feet sequence. Everybody kind of oohed and aahed and was like, ‘Oh, no!’ I went for it and started laughing because I wasn’t getting it as much as I wanted to, but I was having fun anyway.”

Over a period of several days, Shola kept getting callbacks until there were only eight in the room. “We each had a broom and they gave us numbers to play on our broom. Then we had newspapers. That’s so finesse. That’s such a finesse part of the show. They told us they’d call us tomorrow.”

When she got home there was a message on the machine that she was hired.

“I ran around the apartment and I hooted and hollered, and my girlfriend was just, ‘My God! My goodness!’”

After seven weeks of training, Shola was a Stomper. The toughest thing she and her partner Jessie faced was getting used to being apart. They’ve adjusted and go out of their way to be together whenever the tour schedule affords an opportunity.

At that point they’d been together for three or four years, having met in college at a GLBT leadership conference. “It was mobilizing the queer movement for communities of color.” While Shola was in training, Jessie was training in shiatsu, a massage technique. “She definitely found her calling and so did I.”

When Shola first came out, her mother didn’t speak to her for two years. Things are better now, Shola says. “She’s come a long way, but it’s been a very difficult transition, coming out. She’s starting to see that I am out in my vocabulary and in action. It’s not just waving a rainbow flag. I am an out performer. I’m not going to be one who leaves her partner in the car when she visits her mother. I want to be respected as myself.”

As for her professional future, Shola says that in the long run she wants to continue making people happy through music.

That’s one thing Stomp does. It’s a celebration of percussive movement and sound. The “instrumentalists” are eight bodies armed with such implements as matchboxes, Zippo lighters, garbage cans and the aforementioned brooms and newspapers.

The first time you see and hear Stomp, your face is sore for days from having smiled so much. You’ll never again think of your body in time and space in quite the same way. It’s not only amazing, it’s, as Shola says, “finesse.”

Broadway San Diego presents Stomp at the Civic Theater at Third Avenue and B Street. Stomp runs March 8-13. For showtimes and ticket information, call (619) 220-TIXS or visit www.gaylesbiantimes.com for a link to their website.

Charlene Baldridge is a freelance arts writer, author and poet. She is the author of San Diego, Jewel of the California Coast (Northland Publishing, May 2003).