Barbara Carlisle (known as “Babs” by us Birds), beloved scholar, teacher, artist, playwright, director, dramaturg, mother, wife, and all-about-woman-of-the-world died this week after a years-long, on-and-off tango with ovarian cancer.
Barbara was one of my mentors in college and beyond. The doors she opened for me are too many to count. She invited me to teach with her while I was still an undergraduate, giving me keys to her Director’s office, calling me her co-teacher (rather than assistant), requesting my comments and insights on syllabus development, student assignments, and evaluation. She cast me in one of my favorite roles of all time… the uppity “Woman” in Offending Shadows, a character so fed up with the manor of things that she begins to rebel against the classic stories. Barbara wrote my recommendations for everything, asked me to read parts of “M Words” with her for a women’s studies event, and put my name into the hat for the lion’s share of fantastic opportunities I participated in during college.
With a PhD from Michigan, a friendly, supportive, and like-minded husband, and interesting children, Barbara was the kind of woman I wanted to emulate. Professionally, she had this marvelous way of describing even the most technical and banal details in ways that connected them to ideas of creativity, artistry, and learning. (This evaluation tool she wrote for the Michigan State Arts Council is a bit of an example of that.) She made me curious about the world, the role of gender, and the structure of things by suggesting exercises so removed from theory that they seemed ridiculous in isolation: word association on huge mats of paper, exploring a classroom through a hole in a piece of cardboard, drawing shapes to correspond to emotions. I used to take notes about her teaching styles, furiously copying down the steps of her “games” in an effort to remember how she managed to bridge the steepest gaps in unassuming, guided ways. Barbara valued the process of things and encouraged students to dig deep into the range of their experiences and interests to find unique ways to build on new information. Barbara was one of the first to realize that I had somewhat accidentally made my way into a second degree and championed my completion of both. She would look at my mess of degrees and concentrations and interdisciplinary foci and think of it as interesting, rich, and fulfilling. She was very content, maybe even preferred, the inability to describe someone in one word. The more messy, varied, and collected… the better.
Barbara was tall, stately, and confident. She was warm and thoughtful, thinking with sparkling eyes over a students’ collage of pictures and poems, ready to see what other new connections she could make between seemingly opposing sides.
In the last email she sent me, she described how she had decorated her bust of Cadmus (a gift from the Chicago cast of Offending Shadows) with the Mardi Gras beads I’d sent her. In her words, she “liked making the connection.” I can picture it… a marble white bust with every detail of Old World style, draped with layers of gaudy beads. Classic, with a twist, and a slight side of humor: this was definitely her style.
Barbara was a fantastic writer. Everything she sent… emails, letters, announcements, cards, were filled with the kind of voice others work for hours to find. But with Barbara it just fell out effortlessly. Sentences that made you feel supported and encouraged, and sent you out in the world fresher than where you were before you’d read them. Receiving a message from her was always a delight.
One of the last things she said to me: “Enjoy every phase of this life you are living — all that you give it, and all that it gives you.”
Thank you, Barbara, for everything. You are sorely missed.
UPDATE: You can purchase Barbara’s collection of plays (including the ones discussed above) in her book “The Louise Plays.” Available here from Amazon.
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