Last week, Carole Bellini-Sharp, the Margaret Bundy Scott Professor of Theatre Emerita, passed away after 43 years of teaching on College Hill. A lot has been said about her in the days since she’s passed, from students and colleagues alike, and it’s been a joy to read about how many lives she transformed. You couldn’t capture Carole in a couple hundred words, so I won’t try to, but she meant the world to me and I wanted to honor her memory by writing something she’d almost certainly think was too earnest. So here goes.
Carole was extremely perceptive, sometimes eerily so, frequently giving her students advice before we knew we needed it. She delighted in packaging her thoughts alongside random onomatopoeia and big, animated faces. She was like if the smartest dissertation you’d ever read had all of its footnotes written in the Wingdings font.
She was also funny. Really funny. I first met Carole when I toured Hamilton as a senior in high school and she had me audit her Theater 201 class. Her students were working on Tristan Tzara’s “The Gas Heart”, an absurd little play in which each character is a body part personified: Eye, Nose, Neck, Eyebrow. Her students decided to perform the scene as if the body in question was having a massive orgasm and Carole, nonplussed (though not terribly impressed) by this decision, watched patiently as six of her students started writhing around, loudly moaning and grunting in unison. The whole thing lasted several minutes. When they were done, Carole turned to me and said, gently, yet fully aware that her students were listening: “Well, one thing’s clear. None of these people have ever had good sex.”
That was the first time Carole ever made me laugh out loud, though certainly not the last, and I applied Early Decision shortly thereafter.
Memories of Carole come to me in vivid, bright flashes of sight and sound. She laughed with her whole body, often jumping several octaves while doing so. I loved her laugh. She’d stay with you at rehearsal until 10 at night and write you follow-up emails at 4 in the morning, only to arrive at her 1 pm class the next day with more energy than any of her students. She’d make fun of you when you got too cocky and she’d grab your hand without warning when she sensed you were hurting. She could detect fear and ghosts with equal precision and navigated life with a deep respect for both. She believed in writing down the weird dreams you had at night but not sharing them with anyone else, because “why would you disrespect a dream by making it boring?”
I’m grateful for every second I got to spend with her. For the hours spent gossiping in her office or her classrooms. For the wisdom she dolled out like it was nothing; about theater, sure, but also about the big life stuff: jobs and love and marriage and health and death, why the Marx Brothers were important, why she never tried LSD, and when to buy fiddlehead ferns. She was profound, harsh, silly, gentle, sarcastic. Sometimes she was all of this at once.
She’ll be in my heart forever — or, as we once cackled about over pancakes at Charlie’s diner — perhaps she’ll be reincarnated as a puddle on Martin’s Way that will, in her own words, “haunt the shit out of people.” I can hear her laugh at just the thought of it.
I loved her very much, and I’ll miss her terribly.
Sincerely,
Wynn Van Dusen ’15
