Obits 2020

From BACDS Country Dancer No. 122 Q3 2020

In Memoriam: Barbara Bickerman

In May 2020, Barbara Bickerman passed away in her home. She is survived by her companion of more than twenty years, Scott Johnson, her brother John, and a nephew and niece, Greg and Melissa. She was cremated at Sinai Memorial Chapel.

Barbara was born in 1949 at Beth Israel Hospital in New York City. She grew up in Stuyvesant Town, a close-knit housing complex built for returning servicemen. For twelve years, she attended the local public schools. In 1962, her family moved to Atlantic Beach on Long Island, where she graduated from Lawrence High School in 1967. She spent the summers of her formative years in Woodstock, New York, a place that held a very special place in her heart and soul. She attended Cornell University during the end of the tumultuous anti-war era, serving in the Student Senate following the student uprising there. She held several jobs after graduation, most of them involving writing, which was her passion. Notably, she held positions of responsibility at IBM, where she was a speechwriter for the president of IBM’s premier marketing division. She produced IBM quarterly stockholder reports and the Report of the Annual Meeting. She left IBM to be a manager at Merrill Lynch, where she provided communications support for major human resources initiatives.

Barbara’s other passion was dance. She was an active member of CD*NY, a group which shares with the New York community their love for contra and English country dancing. She was a fixture at the spring dance weekends in Hudson Guild, NY and the Pinewoods summer dance camps near Plymouth, MA.

In 1997, she attended George Marshall’s Tropical Dance Vacation in St. Croix, where she met Scott. They clicked, and she moved to Santa Clara to be with him. In California, Barbara worked for Stanford University Lively Arts, which merged her love of the arts with writing. She later worked as a writer and editor for LSI Logic and Stanford Hospital. Before retiring, she worked at the Apple Store in Palo Alto selling computers and conducting workshops.

Barbara was a graceful and elegant dancer. She and Scott participated in California dance events as far north as Healdsburg and as far south as San Diego. From Pāhoa, HI to Coeur d'Alene, ID, to Hopewell Junction, NY. The acclaimed bass player Stuart Kenny said, “I loved Barbara’s grace and beauty that she always showed on the dance floor. When there are people like Scott and Barbara out there it always makes the treks across the country to provide you with music worth it. I will miss her moving forward and a part of my groove I put out in the music will have her in mind.”

Barbara was never without a book and always had several recommendations of what you should read. She even tried her hand at improvisational acting. She was generous of spirit and loved to engage with people, even total strangers. Anybody within ten feet was in danger of becoming a friend, whether they knew it or not. We will miss her dearly.

From BACDS Country Dancer No. 123 Q4 2020

In Memoriam: Dick Bagwell

Dick Bagwell died at home with loved ones by his side on September 6, 2020, following a heart attack a few days earlier. He was 84. He was a musician, actor, writer, director, and educator, with a BA in Theatre from Northwestern and an MA in Theatre from Penn State. He performed as the Pied Piper and Merry Will Kemp at fairs and festivals across the US. He enjoyed Scottish and English country dance and danced with morris teams, most recently Deer Creek, until a stroke in September 2014 left him hemiplegic.

Notable accomplishments include marching with Martin Luther King in Selma, Alabama, in 1965; developing programs as educational director for the Living History Centre in 1973–1979 that continued long after his association with the Renaissance Faire; writing the influential Poor Richard’s Guide to the Queen’s Tongue, the Faire Person’s Elizabethan Bag, and Basic Faire Accent Pronunciation Guide; creating the ever-popular Saucy French Postcard Tableaux Review for the Dickens Christmas Fair in 1974; performing his one-man show “Shakespeare’s Clown” at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1982; the 1988 publi- cation of his Pipe & Tabor Tutor (which remains the definitive instruction book for the instruments); starring in the 2004 Portland Revels as Tom Sly; and Goat Hall’s production of his chamber opera “To Hell with Heroes,” which features Osama bin Laden welcoming George W. Bush to hell, at its New Voices Festival in 2014. The family is planning a virtual memorial. Please contact Gillian Bagwell for more information.

—Gillian Bagwell