LAKE BALBOA, Calif. – When Dorothy sang about going over the rainbow, she was imagining a place where there isn’t any trouble. Paula Sargent used to imagine that place too, until she found it.

“For me, it’s here," she told a class of high school students in Lake Balboa.

Born Paula-Sue Levine, Sargent has been teaching for roughly 30 years – more than half of them at Birmingham Community Charter High School. Even after retiring, she continued to substitute. One day, she mentioned Judy Garland to a student and the student didn’t know who she was.

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“So from the time it took me to walk from her seat to the teacher’s desk was about two seconds and in my head I created this class," Sargent said.

Sargent worked with the school to craft a syllabus for a class devoted to studying Hollywood Musicals. A class she now teaches five day a week.

“And technicolor is going to be a vocab word," she warned the students.

Teaching, however, wasn’t always her goal.  In the late 1960s, when she was barely older than the students she teaches now, Sargent was hired as the lead singer of a pop music group.  

“We were called Brandi Perry and the Bubble Machine," she said, "They changed my name to Brandi.”

She and her bandmates, none of them older than 20, travelled overseas to entertain the troops in Vietnam. They were there for less than a month when their vehicle was attacked.

“We were the only American troop to be ambushed by the Vietcong," Sargent said.

Two of her bandmates were killed. Phil Pill who played piano, a “17-year-old kid with a great amount of potential," Sargent said, and Curt Willis.

“Our drummer who died in my arms," Sargent said of Willis.

Sargent and guitarist Jack Bone were both wounded and had to play dead while their vehicle was repeatedly fired upon and looted. “We couldn’t do anything," she recalled.

They hid there waiting for help for hours. Army Sargent David Hamilton, who was escorting the group, was also shot and unconscious. He later died at a hospital in Japan.

“His name on the wall," she said, pulling a rubbing of his name out of her scrapbook.

After that, Brandi went back to being Paula and 50 years later, she still sings. Sargent has a regular gig performing with her brother at Las Hadas in Northridge.  

But her best performance is still in the classroom.  She is not just teaching kids about musicals, but about strength and surviving.  Even they ask her to sing, and surprise her with a show of appreciation when eventually she gives in. She says she gets the same joy from teaching that she does from singing.

“I love the people contact," said Sargent. "Everybody is with you and you are with them. That’s what I love about it.”

So much so that after 30 years, it’s more than a career. It’s her home.

“And as Dorothy would say, and you know she’s going to say it," she told the students, "there’s no place like home.”