Sheena Easton — Raising Kids In Vegas, Out Of The Spotlight

Sheena Easton begins a typical morning by drinking Diet Coke and watching “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” on TiVo.

“I had a very public crush on Peter Jennings. I still think he was the world’s sexiest man,” Easton, 49, tells me in her Scottish accent. “But I tell you who I think right now is probably the hottest guy to walk the planet. Jon Stewart. Oh, hell yeah! Gorgeous and funny and intelligent. See, smart and funny gets me every time.”

Has Easton, a four-time divorcee, met Stewart?

“No. I would drool all over him and make an ass of myself.”

Stewart is married, you know.

“It doesn’t matter, you can still look. A woman can still dream,” Easton says and laughs.

Easton — performing at South Point Friday and Saturday — has been living here in Las Vegas since 2000, when she began a showroom show at the Rio, then the Hilton, and cohosted a local TV show. After those shows ended, she stayed and has lived in relative peace, raising two children who are now teenagers, and flying around the world every few weekends to perform in concert.

“When I first moved here, people would say, ‘How do you live in Vegas?’ People think it’s only the Strip, like thinking all New Yorkers live on 5th Avenue. We live in these small communities. Everyone knows who each other is. They see me bringing in the mail in my jammies, or at the market with no makeup on. They don’t give a crap [about the famous name]. I’m just the person buying 15 cans of dog food.”

She and her two kids met some of the best friends of their life here and felt bound to those who took them in as if they were family. She really only hates the sun.

“I look like Frosty the Snowman. I glow in the dark. My kids laugh, because I go out with long sleeves on in the summer, and hats. Right now, the [March] weather is too hot for me. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m dying.’”

She reminds me she’s turning 50 in April. She says things like, “I’m ancient now.” But that's the version of Sheena Easton who leads a quieter life.

“I’m not driven the way that other artists are. I look at some artists of my generation,” like Bette Midler, Madonna and Cher. “I look at that and go, ‘Girl, I don’t know if I want to be doing that in 10 year’s time: eight shows a week.’ … No, I couldn’t do it.’”

Maybe when her teenagers, ages 13 and 14, go to college, she could take a chunk out of her life to ramp up her career again.

“But right now, I like the balance I have. I perform some. And I clean out the kitty litter trays, and do the dishes, and sit down and yell at my kid for not doing their homework. It’s not glamorous.”

Easton doesn’t show up at local red carpets or openings, the way some other local celebrities do. When she does go to shows on or off the Strip, she buys her own tickets, instead of reaching out for publicity freebies, as she doesn’t want to feel the pressure to go backstage to meet performers.

“If you were absolutely blown away by the performance, if it just made you go, ‘Wow,’ and you say that [to a star backstage], you sound like an ass. And if you sat there and went, ‘Uh, this kind of sucked a little, it wasn’t as good as I thought it was gonna be,’ what are you gonna say to the person that’s not gonna hurt their feelings?”

There is one performer she’d like to meet backstage, John Mayer. She owns all his music. But her son doesn’t want her to, she jokes.

“My son said to me — because, of course he’s 14 and God forbid his mom should make an ass out of herself in front of him and embarrass him — and he said, ‘Mom, if you ever go to see John Mayer, you better not go backstage and gush all over him! That would just be gross! Because you’re ancient compared to him!’

“I said, ‘Listen, I would treat him like a son. I would be very proud. I wouldn’t be doing that cougar thing with him. I would just tell him what a wonderful musician he is.”

Besides, she’s into Jon Stewart, remember? And here’s where she embraces her son’s word “ancient” at age 49.

“I’m ancient now. I’ve been performing since I was 17. I went to college when I was 17. I had my one-room [apartment], and I supported myself in this industry since I was 17, and supported my family, and managed to make a livin’ in it, and keep on going. To me, that’s a miracle, to keep working full time in this business. I’m very grateful.”

You have to admit, that was a long time ago, age 17, when she was studying at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. She was singing with bands at night. Her plan was to be a drama teacher who sang in wedding bands.

During her final year in college, the BBC put out a call for young talent. The TV network was planning to do a documentary, as part of a series called “The Big Time.” BBC producers wanted to follow a young singer going through auditions for a record deal.

“It was a naïve assumption, if you look back on it. I found out later you don’t show up to audition at a record company,” she says.

A college lecturer who knew Easton sang told her about the BBC show. She auditioned and won the spot.

She found out later that EMI Records wasn’t keen on the idea of the BBC show. The man who ended up signing Easton to a contract had gone into her audition with his mind made up beforehand not to sign her, because he figured it would be a nightmare to deal with a TV show subject.

But then he heard her. She was “raw” and “not bad,” so he signed her. She cut “9 to 5,” which was renamed “Morning Train” in the U.S., her No. 1 song from 1980.

What did she learn from her “Big Time?” This:

“Yeah, I was talented, but I’m sure there were a million singers more talented than me. But I was talented; I got a phone call which gave me an opportunity to walk through a door; which was kind of scary. I could have said, ‘This is too scary. I don’t want to do that.’ But I had the balls to go do it. And I knew that I could fail publicly — really publicly — or I could succeed. So the one thing I learned, and the thing I pass onto anybody is: To get a big break in this business, you gotta have some kind of talent, a lot of balls, and a lot of luck.”

“I also learned: Youth and ambition go together. If I got the same phone call today, I’d say, ‘Naw, I’m not interested.’ Because I’ve done it all already. I’ve experienced it. I don’t think ambition is something that lasts a lifetime.

“I still remember the fire in the belly. I still remember if they’d said to me back then, ‘We can get you a chance to record a single, but you’re gonna have to eat a bucket of spiders and climb Mount Everest and stand naked in the middle of Times Square,’ I would have said, ‘THEN what do I have to do?' Because of the thought of, ‘Oh my God, I get to record a single.’

“Now I still love to sing. I still love music. But I don’t have that burnin’ ambition, to where I’ll do anything for a career. … I don’t care what career you’re in, the ambition goes away. You still enjoy the job, but the ambition dies down.”

Her ambition wore thin at the end of her 20s.

“I didn’t slow down. I worked my ass off too much. I literally spent my life on the road. By the time I was 30, I was burned out. I was tired and exhausted. I had been around the world a million times and seen nothing but the airport, the TV studios, and the hotels and the radio stations. I hadn’t seen any of the tourist attractions.”

Her typical morning went like this:

“I’d be, like, ‘Oh God, let me look at my schedule. It’s Paris today, Milan the next day, Zurich — oh God, I don’t believe I have to do this.’ I mean, BURNT OUT so young.

“I really didn’t have an option. When you are ultra successful, if you are pursuing a career in the music industry, the first thing the record company will tell you is, ‘We’ve put a crapload of money into this album. If you want to make it a hit, you’ve got to go out and do every interview, go to every city, talk to every DJ, go on every talk show in every country.’

“And back then, my records were hits all around the world. So it was EVERY country’s version of ‘The Tonight Show,’ and EVERY country’s version of ‘Good Morning America,’ and all of the press, and all of the radio. And … you were getting ready for the concert tour, and you were also getting ready to record the next album. So you really didn’t have the time to just sort of chill and take a few weeks off in Paris and enjoy it. So it was kind an all or nothing thing. That’s why I’m glad I was young and had the energy. I woudn’t want to do it now.”

She doesn’t regret it.

“Nobody put a gun to my head. The choices I made, I made myself. … One of my big issues is I take personal responsibility. Would it be worth it to me today? No. I wouldn’t sacrifice my children for my career. There’s nothing you could offer me if it meant giving up being a mom. I just wouldn’t do it. And that’s been for the last 14 years.

“So maybe I was lucky I was sated. I’ve had my share of all those experiences when I was very young. So by the time I was 30, I took a look around my life and said: I could keep doing this for 30 years, and I could go to bed in a fancy mansion with servants with my shiny disks on the wall and my awards — and not have something that my soul was craving, and that was to be a mom.”

So here she is in Vegas. Keep an eye out for her.

“You’re more likely to see me at Chile’s and the movies and Vons than any of the fancy places.”