There is a pixielike quality to the woman who opens the door to a high-in-the-sky condominium just off City Avenue in Bala Cynwyd.
And no wonder: While she is officially Jane Norman, she is TV's Pixanne to the legions of young fans who joined her every weekday afternoon in her magic forest. For nearly two decades, first locally on WCAU-TV from 1960 to 1969, then nationally for seven more years when the show was syndicated, she was a kind of Pied Piper in green felt.
Norman's close-cropped hair, her enviably slender body, and her sparkling spirit hark back to that woodland creature who made the world seem like a wonderful, magical place for kids.
These days, Norman doesn't live in a magical forest. Home is a light-splashed contemporary world with a high quotient of glamour, sophistication, and spectacular views.
But that magical forest still lives in Jane Norman. "I've been so blessed, so lucky," Norman says as she relates her own fairy tale of a little Philadelphia girl who was a piano prodigy, able to play Bach and Beethoven by ear when her feet couldn't yet reach the pedals.
"When I was 8 years old, the Philadelphia Orchestra played one of my compositions at a children's concert," she remembers. "Somewhere, I still have the certificate they gave me that day."
Norman went on to study education at Temple, minoring in radio, TV, and theater. For several years, her kindergarten teaching wowed kids, whose parents kept telling her she should be on TV. So, one late summer day in 1960, she walked into WCAU-TV on a whim. She impressed the station manager, went home, and the very next day showed up with the concept for a kids' TV show. Pixanne, the name she proposed, stuck.
Since that day, Norman has never stopped performing, first on television, then in years of one-woman shows and cabaret acts like Broadway Magic Moments and Beyond, which previewed at the Prince Music Theater. Her music (she has released several albums, including 2010's A Perfect Christmas) is often romantic standards and the mellow fare of composers like Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Rodgers & Hart.
The Philadelphia area has always been home base for Norman. She met her husband, the late Frank Beazley, at WCAU, where he was a sales director. He later went on to found the production company Center City Film & Video with partner Jordan Schwartz.
It was Beazley who pushed his wife to give up the couple's large home in Gladwyne and pursue a lower-maintenance lifestyle in a condominium.
