courtesy photo
June Cook was a supportive and wonderful friend, advocate, dog lover, and generous soul.
When I first moved to Greensboro, I also founded the summer wing (The Greensboro Arts Alliance and Residency, GAAR) of my New York Theater Company, the Mirror Repertory Company. June was instantly welcoming and kind. She immediately befriended me, often taking me to lunch or dinner or fixing meals at her house in Craftsbury Common.
I adored her and looked forward every summer to seeing her. Over time we became friends in winter too, all year long. In one play we did at the Hardwick Townhouse her beautiful granddaughter danced, and I began to meet the delightful people in her whole family. All of them were as nice as June. Also all very attractive, for June was a pretty woman.
As for GAAR/The Mirror, June wrote all the reviews for our extensive work over the whole 18-plus years that we worked in Vermont. Her support and perspicacity were obvious in these reviews. June was a very bright woman.
Her support also inspired a town movement to find a permanent space for GAAR. I brought in the world-famous architect Hugh Hardy, who was on the Mirror’s advisory board in NYC for 30 years, and he and I collaborated to design what is now the Highland Center for the Arts.
But it was June’s writings, and her interviews of cast members and me and my casting director Eve Pomerance, daughter of the great playwright Bernard Pomerance, who wrote “The Elephant Man” and “Miranda,” his gorgeous play about Early America in Roanoke, which we used as our first play in HCA in the 2019-20 Season, are what really supported GAAR the most and made it happen, as well as HCA itself. We owe June a lot, all of us.
The Gazette published her reviews, just as they had published all the community support from theater goers and letters from financial backers of HCA. She wrote all about the process, which we led, that ultimately resulted in HCA being built.
June wrote this review “The Vermont premiere of playwright Bernard Pomerance’s, “Miranda,” presented by Greensboro Arts Alliance & Residency and Highland Center for the Arts last week-end, drew standing ovations. “Miranda,” a visceral play with a dichotomy of passions, absorbs its audience totally. It was directed by GAAR Artistic Director Sabra Jones and Tiokasin Ghosthorse from the Cheyenne River Lakota Nation of South Dakota.”
June’s intellect and goodness of heart and caring never stopped, and in my personal realm, she made living in Vermont both possible and pleasurable. She was one of a kind. And lastly, when my apartment house in New York no longer allowed dogs, June was the person who stepped up and said, “I’ll take her,” giving my little dog a life in Vermont as well.
June was always there for people, always ready to give love and to help. With all my heart I shall miss June and know that she is surely one of God’s favorites up above, just as she was our favorite down here in Greensboro, Vermont. And, to borrow on Shakespeare’s beautiful words, it is absolutely certain that “flights of angels” are transporting her.
