Mamie Perry Wood (1862-1949) was an American classical singer who was trained in Italy and lived in Los Angeles, California. As the city's first operatic diva, she was credited with bringing enthusiasm for grand opera to the city. Education and musical career As a child, wrote Ed Ainsworth of the Los Angeles Times, Mamie Perry "soon showed a natural inclination to sing. by the time she was in her teens it was obvious her talent was of a high order." When the girl was fifteen, her first voice teacher in Los Angeles was Lizzie Hutchinson Cogswell. She began her studies at Mills Seminary in Oakland in the winter of 1877-78 and continued there in 1878. Returned to Los Angeles, she studied in 1878-79 with Madame Marra Vorron. A Los Angeles Herald critic said that since her first concert she had "developed a positively phenomenal soprano voice, though, of course, it is yet but in the infancy of its development. . . . she has a magnificent organ and a musical aptitude which has accomplished wonders . . . ." In 1881, Perry went to Milan, Italy, to study first under Professor Albitis and then Antonio Sangiovanni of Mantua. She made her debut in Ostiglia in October 1881, as the lead in The Countess of Amalfi, assuming the stage name of Maria Perrini. "She was so very fine that the public named her the 'Canary of the Pacific,'" wrote her impresario, A. Manzoni. The Gazeta dei Teatre said of her that: not yet twenty years of age, [she] has from her good schooling acquired an admirable agility, a grand extension of voice and exquisite grace, a queenly appearance and rare rare beauty. Every evening she is greeted with crushing applause from her first appearance until her last note. She also sang in Milan, Florence and elsewhere, Ainsworth wrote, "in the then-popular opera Contessa d'Amalfi and was received with great enthusiasm. . . . All this time, of course, Los Angeles was bursting with pride over its first prodigy. The newspapers carried accounts of Mamie's triumphs and everybody eagerly awaited her return." The city "found in Miss Perry the qualities it most wanted — and it gave her the fullest measure of its adulation and devotion as the first 'native-born' star ever to emerge here. . . . She sang in choirs and at benefits and, indeed, lent her voice to any