STEPPING OUT
NEW YORK BAR BELTER
THERESA SAREO BOUNCES BACK
By PETER S. GREEN

July 2, 2006 -- Tossing back a thick mane of brown hair, Theresa Sareo, a full-throated singer with piercing brown eyes and a hesitant half-smile, says she is definitely "Alive Again."

That's the name of her new album, privately released last week, meant to pay tribute to New York in the months following Sept. 11. But Sareo only had a few tracks written when she experienced her own tragedy.

She takes a visitor to the southeast corner of 34th Street and Park Ave-nue, and points to a bent metal pole beside a fire hydrant. "Apparently," she says, sounding like a tour guide showing the sights, "I was pinned to that pole, and that's when my leg was severed."

The story is told in a matter-of-fact way, but what happened to Theresa Sareo that June day four years ago was anything but ordinary. Sareo had just dropped off some material for her agent and was waiting to cross Park Avenue when she was hit by a skidding SUV. Her life changed.

A quick-thinking dentist standing a few feet away applied a tourniquet to her bleeding leg and started CPR. Minutes later, Fire Department paramedics arrived, whisking her to nearby Bellevue hospital, where she lay in a coma for over a week. When she woke up, she found her right leg had been amputated at the hip.

Sareo remembers nothing of the accident, and what she knows now she pieced together from witness accounts. "It's hard to wake up changed and not know how you got there," Sareo says. "It's hard to wake up handicapped. But I can still do what matters most to me: music."
Photo: Helayne Seidman

For the more than 15 years before that SUV careened out of control across Park Avenue, Sareo was a working songstress. She came down to the city fresh out of high school from rural Elmira, N.Y., tried acting and took classes at the HB Studios on Bank Street. Sareo sang and danced her way through chorus lines in off-off-Broadway plays and church performances.

And she never stopped singing. She played the bars on the downtown circuit - the Bitter End, CBGB Gallery and the Lower East Side's now-vanished C-note. She wrote her own songs, "Pop-rock country, really," she says, influenced by her upstate upbringing on Neil Young, the Eagles, the Doobie Brothers and Elton John.

Theresa Sareo has a voice that makes you think of Bonnie Raitt or Linda Rondstat. The gigs in New York don't come easy, so Sareo played private parties and tended bar at Baby Bo's Bur-rito's, a Tex-Mex restaurant and bar near her Murray Hill home.

After 9/11, she organized and sang in a benefit concert for her local firehouse, Engine 16 and Ladder 7, that lost several firefighters in the Twin Towers. The surviving firemen visited her in the hospital as soon as they heard about the accident.

The recovery wasn't easy. She feared that with her shattered body, she wouldn't have the confidence to perform onstage. "It's hard for an entertainer," she says. But in the hospital she was visited by other amputees who encouraged her to get on with her life: Ed Rogers, a New York drummer who lost an arm and a leg when a subway hit him, and Eddie McGee, the one-legged, $500,000 winner from "Big Brother."

"These were my angels, the people who showed me what life on one leg looks like and that you can be happy and pursue your dream." They encouraged Sareo to start writing songs again.

Four years after the accident, she's completed "Alive Again," recorded with some of New York's top jazz and rock talent, including Steely Dan guitarist Jon Herington and "Saturday Night Live" band drummer Shawn Pelton. The album, she says, "is like the bent pole on the corner - a testimony to my life, that I really did survive."

Slowly - first with a few benefit concerts for herself, then as she moved from crutches to a high-tech computerized prosthetic leg - Sareo's been moving back into the limelight. She has regular gigs at a few bars around town, including the hip Bubble Lounge on West Broadway, and an old-time trattoria on Arthur Avenue in The Bronx's Little Italy. She's also taken up a career as a motivational speaker, talking to groups ranging from immigrants in English-language classes to other recent amputees. She speaks about overcoming the obstacles life throws in one's path.

On a recent Thursday night, as nearly 100 fans filled Bleecker Street's The Bitter End for the launch of her album, Sareo crooned, "Singing for a living with a cozy little place in the city. Not much for some, but it was all I desired."

For more information on Theresa, visit her website at www.theresasareo.com