Melissa Bair Thoma

The practical side of Melissa Thoma founded Thoma Thoma, a Little Rock marketing firm. Her artistic side is as an opera singer and she has showcased her musical chops on the stage at Wildwood Park for

Melissa Thoma
Melissa Thoma

— Melissa Thoma began singing as a child on the front porch of her granny’s home on the big bend of the Ouachita River. Thoma relished time on the stage throughout high school — and then set aside her vocal pursuits for a more practical career.

When she took to the stage in 1993 for the first time as an adult, she was in heaven.

She and her husband, Martin, were attending First United Methodist Church in downtown Little Rock at the time.

“One of my dear friends in the choir was Lucy Lockett Cabe, and Lucy was busy developing Wildwood. Lucy came up to me one day and said, ‘Girl, they need some geishas. They need cast, and I told them you were fantastic,’” Thoma says. “So I was kind of lucky that I slipped into Wildwood, into opera, through the back door and I started as a geisha in Madame Butterfly. It felt incredible. I was able to sing with professionals in a professional venue. There were, you know, directors and wig artists and costume designers.”

She performed in subsequent seasons as well, reveling in roles like Peep-Bo in The Mikado, Cousin Hebe in H.M.S. Pinafore, the maid in The Barber of Seville, Hansel in Hansel and Gretel.

“It was an incredible creative break for me and it was a way to really be able to sing at a high level even though I lacked, really, the necessary training to do it,” she says. “I was able to kind of experience that and explore and to learn. That’s really where I learned about opera and it’s really where I learned what it’s about to be a professional musician.”

In those days, opera was the focus at Wildwood, which got its start as the Arkansas Opera Theatre. It later became Wildwood Park for the Performing Arts.

In 2000, Thoma joined the board at the invitation of founder and Executive and Artistic Director Ann Chotard. When Chotard retired in 2007, the board wasn’t sure whether it could keep the doors open.

“We knew that we had to have a bigger vision for it and that we had to get people in there and that we had to help all of Little Rock value it in all these different ways,” says Thoma, 50. “In other words, if you’re a family in west Little Rock, are you aware that that’s one of the only amazing free public park spaces? We open the doors seven days a week.”

Cliff Baker, hired as director in 2008, suggested expanding what the park was known for — inviting thousands of people, flinging open the gates and broadening the definition of art and taking the word “Performing” out of the park’s name.

“That was deeply important because now it is a park for the arts and those can be culinary and those can be gardening and all kinds of things,” Thoma says. “This was a foundational place where I could experience myself as an artist. That meant something to me, and I wanted a place where anyone could experience themselves in that way.”

Thoma was president of the board when Baker arrived.

“For all her joyfulness and craziness, underneath it all there’s a very organized person who is able to make a calendar work six different ways and it’s that instinct of making sure she has hours to give the organization as opposed to being just an advocate for it,” Baker says.

Thoma, of course, is in the perfect position to promote Wildwood’s mission. Coowner of Thoma Thoma in Little Rock, she works alongside her husband to address clients’ marketing needs.

She left her job as art director at Arkansas Times magazine to start the business in 1987, while pregnant with their daughter, Claire, who accompanied her to business meetings for about a year and a half as she multitasked without the benefit of child care.

Business began rolling in and Martin Thoma, then a copywriter for Resneck Stone Ward and Associates advertising agency (now Stone Ward), decided to join her.

The pair went to the same Fayetteville elementary, junior and high schools, but didn’t really become acquainted until Melissa’s freshman year at the University of Arkansas.

They got engaged after dating just five weeks and were married in October 1983. After college, they loaded everything they owned into their Buick Skyhawk and hit the road, planning to interview and explore their way up the East Coast.

“We were terribly optimistic and light-hearted about the whole thing. We didn’t work while we went up the East Coast. We took our savings and we just traveled and interviewed,” she says. “It was an excellent adventure. Looking back, I realize how precious those times are. What that trip did for me was it opened my eyes to all of these potentials that you could live.”

GRANNY PANTIE

Thoma didn’t grow up in a family that traveled, the exception being an occasional jaunt to Kansas to see family.

Thoma was 6, the youngest of three, when her father, Rex Bair, died.

“Here was my little mother and she had not gone to college and she is not yet 40 and she has three children,” Thoma says. “But that woman is tough and smart and with it. She took some secretarial courses — I don’t know what that must have felt like in the middle of grief and walking into campus at 38 and sitting in on these freshman-level secretarial classes.”

Thoma’s close-knit family filled in the gaps.

“My father’s mother was named Pantie — Granny Pantie Bair, married to Shorty Bair. You have to have a sense of humor to survive in this family,” Thoma laughs. “Pantie Bair grew up on the big bend of the Ouachita River at Mount Ida, Ark., and she was a spitfire and she was hysterical and she could be equal parts amazing and loving and funny and outrageous and scary.”

Music is part of Thoma’s earliest family memories.

“Growing up in my world meant that whenever you got together at your granny’s house, you were going to sing no matter what. You didn’t get together if the guitar didn’t come out and you didn’t sing. And you sang folk music and you sang in a bazillion-part harmony,” she says. “You sang everything. You sang ‘Do Lord’ and ‘I’ll Fly Away’ and all these bizarre ballads … and that was what you were supposed to do. And you probably just finished a meal that Granny Pantie cooked that had seven vegetables from her garden, three meats and six pies.”

POPPING A CORK

It was probably this communion of food, family and good feelings that attracted the grown-up Thoma to come up with the concept of Uncorked Live!

She met Faith Anaya of Kids Cook! fame when her son, Sam, and Anaya’s son became friends in middle school.

“We both enjoy wine and creating meals and we often got our families together to make dinner together,” Anaya says. “In late 2007 Melissa was looking for something creative to do outside of Thoma Thoma and I was interested in creating adult events to complement my kids’ cooking classes. Around that time we met sommelier Jonathan Looney — the three of us clicked and Uncorked Live! was born.”

The tag line for their brainchild is “Great Food. Great Wine. Great Friends.”

“It’s so much fun. Everybody gathers and they cook the menu, so that’s the cooking portion,” Thoma says. “Then they sit at the table together and they have a blind tasting of about five wines and Jonathan does notes around it and the reason we do blind is that we have people who are really advanced and they are having fun trying to figure out the varietal and the year and there are people who have never done anything like this.”

Thoma is also the chairman of the Arkansas District Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions and she is involved with Friends of the Arts through the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Despite her love of music, pursuing a career in that industry would probably not have been encouraged, especially given the challenges her mother, Donna Bair, faced in supporting their family when she was widowed, so Thoma majored in journalism.

Her Wildwood stage experience was reassuring.

“I realized that I had a deep love for music and I had a voice that probably was good enough and I had enough innate talent that I could have developed that out — but it wasn’t my personality. You are a business of one and to succeed you are your own CFO, CEO, you are your own agent, you are your own marketing director — you are alone a lot. So I learned an important thing. I could’ve done it and I wouldn’t have been happy,” Thoma says. “The other thing I learned was that I was never going to tell a young person who had the desire that they couldn’t do it. I became really involved in supporting and mentoring young artists as they developed their careers.”

Vicki Kovaleski, president of Friends of the Arts, says Thoma shines in any group dynamic.

“We have had some small group meetings and it can feel like a reunion of old friends when she is there. We have really gotten along when brainstorming is involved. We can go all over the map with ideas, giggle, make jokes and yet have solutions at the end,” Kovaleski says.

THE BUSINESS OF MARRIAGE

In the early days of their company, Thoma and her husband worked out of the back bedroom of their home in the Quapaw Quarter, meeting with clients who would drop in at all times of the day and night to talk shop.

They decided the best way to solve their clients’ problems, she says, was “to really listen to the outside, to look at the competition, to look for spaces and opportunities, to listen to what the customer needs and wants and what they already feel or think about you or what they feel or think about the potential or whatever, and merge those two. We began then crafting a process that became our central brand product, called the Brand Navigator System, to uncover the brand in that way.”

Somewhere along the way, Thoma realized that she and Martin approached marriage much like they approached work — and she set out to write The Business of Marriage.

“When you’re running a business with your husband you can’t be at each other, you can’t yell at anybody out there,” she says, waving toward the people outside her office overlooking Little Rock’s River Market District. “We have learned how to work through to an agreement, how to argue without going below the belt, or without hurting each other’s dignity or the magic word, disrespecting each other in any way. But I am, needless to say, a little scattered and it’s hard for me to find time to write a book.”

She decided to market a blog, which would mean writing 800 words a month, with a good editor to back her up. A friend passed on the name of an editor and Thoma e-mailed her idea, which was snapped up even before Thoma realized where she had sent it.

“I realized that it was womenentrepreneur.com and it was Entrepreneur magazine’s new women’s portal and I was suddenly a columnist for them and when I looked at the bio list of all the other columnists I about died because they didn’t have Granny Panties; they were people [who] had been on Good Morning America and stuff like that and I sure hadn’t,” she says. “I’m so glad I didn’t think about it too much.”

The women’s portal closed three years later, and Thoma moved her work to a personal blog and kept going.

“I get as many if not more e-mails and letters from men,” she says. “This is a metaphor ... something that a man can really understand and relate to. Men aren’t always wired to understand why they’re from Mars, but a man really does understand business — he gets all those metaphors.”

Her schedule has been flexible from the beginning, meant to allow her to meet deadlines while taking time out to take her children to the zoo. Claire graduated from Wellesley (Mass.) College, with undergraduate degrees in French and astronomy and is working toward a master’s degree in museum studies at Indiana University-Purdue University. Sam is a senior at Episcopal Collegiate School.

Thoma is on a sabbatical of sorts, taking time off from work as often as she can to work on her book.

MARATHON WOMAN

She started running just after turning 40, having learned to run a mile during a boot camp. In 2006 she ran the Rock ’n’ Roll half-marathon in Phoenix.

“I loved half-marathons and as soon as I got that first one under my belt I began kind of urging my daughter, her friends, some of the kids that worked here, to come and join me,” she says. “Her senior year Claire and I just decided we could celebrate that incredible milestone and do something really, really neat together by running that full marathon. I’ve done it ever since and we usually manage to do one a year or so.”

Falling in love with running is not the only thing she has done she didn’t really expect to do. A couple of years ago she and a friend waited in front of 7th Street Tattoos to be first to get tattooed by the owner.

She shaved a 1-inch square just above the hairline on the right side of her neck and had her company logo tattooed there. Her hair has grown in so only she — and the people she tells — knows the tattoo is there.

“I’m truly branded!” she says.

SELF PORTRAIT

Melissa Thoma

DATE, PLACE OF BIRTH Nov. 27, 1961, Fayetteville.

I’M PASSIONATE ABOUT Live performance.

I LOVE MUSIC THAT Really expresses the person who’s performing it, that really tells me something about the artist who’s behind it.

THE LAST BOOK I READ AND LIKED WAS The Secret of Chanel No. 5: The Intimate History of the World’s Most Famous Perfume by Tilar J. Mazzeo.

IN HIGH SCHOOL I WAS The drama, singing, artsy girl that was usually onstage or in my choir or I sang with a group called the Choralettes, which was a girls glee club, for lack of a better word.

THE THING I’M MOST PROUD OF IS That my daughter and I spent time training for and then completed our first marathon together to celebrate her senior year in high school.

MY FAVORITE INDULGENCE IS Fine wine.

I WANT TO BE REMEMBERED FOR Being the woman who encouraged you to know that you could, and then also walked with you to help you get there.

ONE WORD TO SUM ME UP Enthusiastic.

High Profile, Pages 35 on 04/01/2012

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