Monday evening, there is a post on Cliff Baker's Facebook page:
This is Guy Couch on Cliff's phone. Because our FB friends list is so different, I thought I'd give you an update, as bizarre as it feels to use his phone.
He was working his corporate work in Midtown Manhattan this week, and after a full day Monday, he complained of a serious headache, laid down on the floor & broke into a cold sweat. Two co-workers/friends took him to Mt. Sinai Medical Center West's ER. I talked to him as they were wheeling him down the hall for a CATScan. In 30 minutes, I talked again with him, although he was already groggy. A doctor's assistant then called asking for my consent to place a drain in his brain. The next call was a consent request to open his head up to clip an arterial aneurysm they found on the CTScan. That was a long surgery, and I got a call from the surgeon after 3 am saying Cliff had some serious damage in his brain, from the bleed, the pressure and the surgery itself. For a week now he has been in the coma and on life support.
I hesitate to tell Karen, but I know she will see it herself.
"He was the only person who could smoke yet not smell like cigarettes," she says.
Already, the past tense. We are adults, we know. A couple of days later, Guy posts that they have made the decision to take Cliff off life support. I have a deadline and I don't want to write another eulogy. But I can't think of anything else. I take an Ambien.
The sleep is shallow. Dreamless. A long slow walk down a gray hall.
I thought about the last time I saw him, bounding out on stage at the end of this year's Gridiron show, contagiously effervescent. It was the moment I first believed the Rep would survive its troubles and rise again.
He once told me that he really wanted to be a writer. That he wanted to be a critic. (I didn't believe him. He always wanted to be Cliff Baker. Who wouldn't want to be a prince?) He went to the University of Missouri to study journalism, but switched to theater his sophomore year.
He became involved with Little Rock's Arkansas Theater of the Philharmonic in 1973. The theater worked out of a storefront on Kavanaugh Boulevard and challenged a community used to dinner theater and high school productions of Bye Bye Birdie with serious, confrontive theater.
It worked. Arkansas did not disappoint Cliff Fannin Baker.
. . .
Gasconade, the name of the Missouri town where he was born, is of French derivative.
This is because the first Europeans to explore south-central Missouri were French, prime among them Rene-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle. By 1758, French explorers, hunters and trappers had virtually explored every river and stream in the area. They decided the local Indians were a boisterous and boastful lot that reminded them of the stereotypical residents of Gascony, a province in southwestern France near Spain populated largely by Basques, who spoke their own language and exhibited a similar otherness.
The town sits at the mouth of the Gasconade River--one of the most crooked rivers in the world--near its junction with the Missouri. The town's population peaked at around 500 in the 1940s; about half that many live there today. Baker's father Rudolph worked as boatyard foreman here.
It is one of those nowherevilles that constellate the interior of our country, one of those places where artists come from.
If you look for a list of notable natives or residents of Gasconade, you'll find none online, though Ken Boyer, the great St. Louis Cardinal third baseman, lived in nearby Hermann and owned an auto dealership there.
Maybe now someone will go on Wikipedia and edit the Gasconade, Mo., entry.
. . .
Thursday morning: This is Guy Couch on Cliff's phone. Cliff Baker passed this morning at 5:50 am EST in New York City. Please light a candle for him.
My friend Clarke Huisman, who met his wife Cindy while they were both working at The Rep, he as a lighting/sound intern and she as the property mistress, remembers an evening in 1988 when they were "waiting in the Green Room" before a production: " Cliff walked in, put his arms around Cindy and me, and proceeded to tell us that we would make really beautiful children. While the sentiment was beautiful, it was a little awkward since we weren't even dating yet! I hadn't yet realized the power of Cliff's vision."
I reach out to people, but nobody can organize their thoughts. I understand. It feels stupid to try to put it into words. That makes it seem banal when it's not banal at all.
Clarke says, "Cliff made everyone feel important."
My friend Bill Jones says, "He always made you feel you were valued individually and as part of a greater family."
I hear versions of this again and again. And I feel it. It's like I lost a member of my family.
What we really lost was an example. A role model. Some who believed in us and trusted us to be better than maybe we even thought we ever could be. Someone who treated people well and never underestimated their capacity to learn and grow and understand.
Someone who could smoke all day and not smell like cigarettes.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 09/09/2018