Each year, Diablo Magazine present their annual Threads of Hope award, which seeks to acknowledge resourceful people who go to incredible lengths to help others. Their compassion and dedication give us hope that we can weather the most uncertain of times. Diablo Magazine call these people our Threads of Hope because their volunteer work strengthens the fabric of our community. This year, our very own Leslie Noel makes the list!

Here is the article, by Diablo Magazine’s Peter Crooks:

Leslie Noel

Lafayette

Peter Pan Foundation

Leslie Noel’s life story is like the old Broadway adage: The show must go on. She has suffered severe illness and personal tragedy, yet at 27 years old, Noel is the founder and director of the Peter Pan Foundation, a nonprofit that puts on musicals starring local kids and teens to raise money for Children’s Hospital & Research Center Oakland.

Noel was an aspiring singer who dreamed of going to Broadway when she woke up on the morning of her 17th birthday unable to move her lower body. The Lafayette resident was diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare nerve disorder that rendered her temporarily paralyzed from the waist down and on the right side of her face.

After a lengthy rehabilitation, Noel performed for several years in a variety of Bay Area theater productions. In 2002, she organized her first revue for Children’s Hospital. More than 500 East Bay teens have participated in Noel’s shows in the past six years, and productions of Grease and other toe-tapping musicals have raised more than $40,000 for the hospital.

In 2007, Noel established her nonprofit foundation to recognize Steffen Ryge, who had been one of Noel’s dedicated students and played Peter Pan in a revue. Ryge was killed in a car accident two months after his Acalanes High graduation. Noel was devastated, but when Ryge’s parents asked her to sing at his funeral, Noel agreed to perform—and realized that Ryge would have wanted the foundation to exist.

Noel remembers the time Ryge visited Children’s Hospital to sing to the kids, which is something Noel’s performers do regularly. “Steffen wore his Peter Pan costume,” Noel says, softly. “He was so good with the children and spent a lot of time coloring with them. One of the kids thrilled Steffen by saying that it was the best day of his life, being able to color with Peter Pan.”

Despite all that she has gone through, Noel is as effervescent as Mary Poppins when working with her musical protégés. At a recent rehearsal at Walnut Creek’s Red House music studio, Noel directed a chorus of eight girls who were harmonizing Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

“That was awesome!” gushed Noel, riffing a happy jingle on her electric keyboard. Her students beamed with pride and exchanged high fives. Next, Riley Sbrana, 16, and Adrienne Bengtsson, 13, crooned “Mooning,” a duet from Grease that they performed at the foundation’s annual Memorial Day production at Diablo Valley College.

“Before I met Leslie, I had some experience playing music but no experience performing before an audience,” says Sbrana, a junior at Monte Vista High, who recently helped Noel write a holiday musical, ’Twas the Opening Night Before Christmas, which debuts this month.

“She encouraged me to perform,” Sbrana adds. “It turned out to be the best thing I could have done—and gave me more self-confidence than I’d ever had.”

—Peter Crooks