It's a Sunday night in a dim cafe near SouthPark. The wine is in the glasses and now it's time for some jazz. A blonde in a black dress strolls to the microphone.

The five-piece combo behind her is made up of some of the city's best. The trumpet player recently moved to New Orleans to play on a riverboat. The percussionist just got off the road with the Indigo Girls. The band builds a groove so smooth, the singer can just slide right in.

A tight sound behind her. An audience in front. A song in her heart. She sings the first lines:

Every time it rains, it rains

Pennies from heaven ...

This is the moment she waited for.

She waited 64 years.

This story starts in the place where so many stories start these days. Cindy Thomson got laid off.

She was finance director for Community Health Services (now called Care Ring), a nonprofit that gives medical care to people with little or no insurance. A year and a half ago it combined its accounting department with other agencies in the same building. The new department had four accountants. Management decided it needed only three. They called her in just before Christmas in 2008. She didn't want to cry in front of them. But she did.

Now she tells it like a Jeff Foxworthy redneck joke: "If you're 62 and you get laid off, you might be retired."

She didn't want to retire.

Cindy stayed on the job until April '09, helping with the transition. On her last day they had a potluck and her boss asked Cindy if she wanted to say anything. She didn't want to speak. Instead, she sang "Pick Yourself Up."

Nothing's impossible, I have found

That when my chin is on the ground,

I pick myself up,

Dust myself off,

Start all over again.

She was always singing. One of her first memories is singing for a little crowd in an old drugstore in Southport. She sang "Pennies from Heaven" in a fifth-grade show at Eastover Elementary. Her dad, Ed "Shorty" Thomson, had been a drummer with the Duke Ambassadors. Her mom, now Judy Nesbit, sang with the Oratorio Singers. There was always music in the house.

Cindy has a three-octave range - when she sings in the choir at the Unitarian church on Sharon Amity Road, she's a soprano - but she grew up loving the "cool jazz" singers of the '50s and '60s, like June Christy and Chris Connor, women who sang smoky and slow.

She picked up gigs here and there, mostly with Ziggy Hurwitz, a former big-band musician who played and taught in Charlotte for decades. She sang at weddings and bar mitzvahs. She sang on wobbly portable stages and screened porches. She sang at the opening of a muffler shop.

But it was always a sideline. She married at 18, had two kids, then got a divorce when they were 7 and 4. She needed steady paychecks. So she got an accounting degree. She liked that the work kept her mind busy so she didn't think about what she really wanted to do.

After she got laid off, she spent months hunting another job in finance. There wasn't much out there, not in a city where banks have shed similar jobs by the thousands. Her current husband, Mike Murphy, teaches chemistry at UNC Charlotte. They had some savings. She wasn't desperate. But even though she didn't miss the work - "I'd been trying not to be an accountant for a long time" - she still felt rejected.

She spent a lot of time at home alone, thinking about her life, listening to old jazz.

Last December, her church had a women's circle to celebrate the winter solstice. Each person had to write down something they intended to do in the coming year.

Cindy wrote one word:

Sing.

Songs fell into place

Not long after that, at another church service, she ran into Kevin Clark. Clark is a trumpet player from New Orleans via Toronto who moved here to be music director at a short-lived restaurant called the Americana. Clark hustled gigs and studio sessions all over town. He was plugged into Charlotte's jazz community.

She said: Kevin, don't you want to help me make a CD?

He said: Sure.

He assembled a band. He booked time at StudioEast on Monroe Road (where James Brown cut "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag"). Professional recording, with professional musicians, costs money. Cindy set a budget of $5,000. She got most of it from her mom.

The hardest part was picking songs. She loved too many. Clark told her to think about a theme, and suddenly it came to her: So many people are having a tough time now. Maybe I can do some songs to make them feel better.

The songs fell into place like a column on a spreadsheet. "Blue Skies." "On the Sunny Side of the Street." "Wrap Your Troubles in Dreams." "Pick Yourself Up," the song from her last day at work.

She recorded in May. It was her first time in a recording studio. Johnny Cash sang there, and John Mellencamp, and Randy Travis. She was nervous. But the guys in the band said they loved her voice, and that made her feel so good, made her wonder why she hadn't been doing this her whole life.

Cindy doesn't have an "American Idol" voice. She doesn't leap for the high notes or skitter up and down the scale. She's calm and controlled, like the jazz she was drawn to growing up.

"We have lots of people wander in here who think they can sing," says Tim Eaton, owner of StudioEast. "The thing about Cindy was, she was so shy, but she had that classic jazz voice. She's something."

She and the band - Clark, keyboardist Mark Stallings, bassist Ron Brendle and drummer Ocie Davis - cut nine tracks in a day. Percussionist Jim Brock - the guy who had been playing with the Indigo Girls - added some touches later. She ended up with 11 songs in all. She called the album "The Sweet Things in Life."

She got the master from the studio and borrowed one of her mom's watercolors for the cover. She sent everything off to a disc-making company. In September a big box came in the mail. Five hundred CDs. Her name on the cover. Her music inside.

The easy part was over.

Besting the demon

Now it's December. Cindy has overspent her budget, and she hadn't thought about how much it would cost after the CD came out. Beer and wine and snacks for a little studio celebration. Custom postcards for the official CD release party at Café Monte. The $5,000 has rolled past $9,000.

But what's worse is the chattering in her head. She'll admit it: She needs stroking, she needs people to tell her the music is good. That's not the way most people are wired. We bark about things we don't like a lot more than we purr about things we do. She has put 125 of her CDs out in the world - sold or given away - and she picks over every comment like a starving child: "I had somebody e-mail me and just say, 'Good job.'

"Good job? What does that mean?"

This is the demon in every artist's brain - that voice saying, You're not good enough, you'll never make it, you're crazy to try. It happens to sound a lot like the voice in the mind of every person getting laid off or bought out or fired. All over this country, in these hard times, the voices sing an unending tune with a two-word refrain: You loser.

So many of us are having to figure out how to tune out the voices, change the station, stomp the demon. Cindy has the advantage of being practical. She has learned that a lot of musicians aren't great with money. She plans to start a business to help them with their finances. It's a bit of a compromise, a dip back into her old life, but it'll keep her around music.

Still, of course, she wants to sing. Her goal for now is to get a regular gig somewhere, nothing fancy, maybe a weeknight at a restaurant. After that, who knows.

She understands the brutal math of the business. She got $500 for the gig at Café Monte, and sold another $200 worth of CDs. But by the time she paid the band and covered Clark's plane ticket - he moved back to New Orleans to play on the riverboat - she was a couple hundred in the hole.

But she spent so many years lining up the numbers, balancing the books. Now she measures in other ways. The thrill of acting on her dreams. A CD with her voice on it, here forever. And a gig in a dim café on a Sunday night, the place packed with nearly 100 people, all of them there to hear Cindy Thomson sing.

It's halfway through the second set, and Cindy starts into "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries." The song has always cheered her up. She took the title of her CD from the lyrics. Over the years the bowl of cherries has come to mean easy money, lots of stuff, no worries. But that's not what the song is about.

The sweet things in life

To you were just loaned

How can you lose

What you never owned...

She gets to the end - Live and laugh at it all - and her voice climbs into that last all and smoothes out into a long Ooo-oooooooh. The guys in the band nod and smile. The applause sounds like wind in the trees.

Officially, she is unemployed. But tonight Cindy Thomson has a job.

She sings.

CINDY SINGS

You can listen to and buy "The Sweet Things in Life" by going to www.cdbaby.com and searching for Cynthia Thomson. (Cindy used her full name because there's a country singer named Cyndi Thomson.)

If you've lost your job, how are you dealing with it? What changes have you made in your life? Tell your story in the reader project called "Coming to Terms" at ttomlinson.blogspot.com.