Actress Lisa Banes, 65, died last night of the severe brain injuries she suffered from a hit and run accident last week. She was crossing the street around Lincoln Center close to Juilliard, our alma mater, when a scooter hit her and she was then rushed to Mt. Sinai Hospital where she never regained consciousness. The narrative symmetry is poetic and tragic and maddening. Her wife, journalist Kathryn Kranhold, and Steve Levitt, our classmate and friend, were by her side when she died.
Lisa and I were in Group 8 in the Drama Division at Juilliard in 1975. Of all the hundreds of people who auditioned on our specific audition day, we were the two accepted, a young lesbian from Colorado and a gay kid from Mississippi. I have always loved her and admired her as an actress, but I have always also felt bonded by that one little detail in my life. One of her many roles was that of Margaret Lord in the musical High Society on Broadway, but she always reminded me of Tracy Lord if Katharine Hepburn had been a bit more keen in her honesty. She was Hepburn swimming out past the shallow parts. I am always reminded of that line delivered by Hepburn as Tracy in The Philadelphia Story trying to describe a beloved boat to her fiancé as “yar.” “It means, uh… easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, right. Everything a boat should be.” Lisa Lou Banes was yar. Everything a person and actress should be.
Several summers ago, she and Steve Levitt and I shared a compound in Provincetown that had a little deck on the bay where we’d sit at the end of the day and watch the sunset and reminisce and laugh not knowing that one day – this day – the reminiscence would be about Lisa herself and the laughter would give way to tears. There will be laughter again when we linger on her memory but not today. Lisa herself had the greatest laugh. She’d often play other roles like Margaret Lord which were variants of that Locust Valley lockjaw type, but it was that own laugh of hers that she could slip into a portrayal of them that could unlock something more deeply human about them all. Looser. More lively. Just plain lovely. The sound of that laugh could unlock more than a jaw when you heard it; it could unlock your heart. That is what I recall today as my heart is broken – how unlocked it was during those sunsets with Steve and her on that little deck where so much summer laughter was launched and now sails back to me when it is needed so.
The last time I saw Lisa was in October of 2017 when The Juilliard School’s Drama Division was celebrating its 50th Anniversary. Those of us in Group 8 decided to have a private dinner of our own the night before the big 50th anniversary celebration at the school. There were about 20 of us in 1975’s Group 8. I left Juilliard before my first year was out of my own accord. There were many personal reasons for that but they never had anything to do with rejecting these classmates. We hear a lot about soulmates but in so many ways those kids – these adults now – were and are mine in ways nobody ever was before or has been since.
That proved true that last night I saw Lisa at that reunion dinner when as we shared a night of rollicking laughter and recitations and remembrances. But it was elegiac at times as well, especially when we talked about another classmate, Billy DeAcutis, who died of AIDS in 1991. I think Lisa would want me to remember him today as well. Billy, in a class of one-offs, was the dearest, funniest, most kind-hearted of one-offs. Billy died on May 5th and each year on that date, Lisa would call Steve Levitt and ask, “Is Billy still in Japan?” And Steve would respond, “Billy’s still in Japan. He can’t find a flight home.”
And yet, that night of our reunion he did.
Lisa recalled for us all that when she was getting ready to go to Billy’s memorial service that she was standing in Steve’s kitchen out in Los Angeles. She turned and for a second she saw Billy standing in front of the refrigerator before he dissolved into the air. Another classmate told a moving story of the death of her young son who had suffered a long illness. At the end, she was lying with him in his hospital bed when she awoke suddenly and saw Billy’s giant face hovering over them in the room before it too dissolved into the air. “Two hours later, my son died,” she said. Later, she said, she visited a renowned psychic who asked her suddenly. “Who’s Billy?” She said he was a classmate of hers at Juilliard but that he had died of AIDS years earlier. “He is here telling you that everything is all right. That he’s all right. That your son is all right. And that his job in the next existence is to help children cross over. He helped your son do that.”
And, at that moment, the lights in the private dining room where we had gathered for our class reunion flickered, went off for maybe a couple of seconds, and flickered back on. And for that flickering wondrous moment – which is a rather lovely description of that time we had together at Juilliard, whether it was for a few months or for four whole years – our tribe was back together.
This morning of Lisa’s own death, Steve Levitt wrote this in a group email to our classmates, to our tribe, to Lisa’s: “A year after Billy died, Lisa and I decided that Billy had just moved to Japan – he was with us but we couldn’t hang out every day. Billy and Lisa are in Japan … having lunch, laughing at nothing and everything, and being fabulous. More to come, more to be written, more tears and memories to share. I loved her like no other friend. I love you all like no other group I will ever have.”
Rest in peace, Lisa Lou Banes. How’s Billy?