Sarah Blackstone

BA 1976, Theatre		Sarah Blackstone, daughter of UW geologist Don Blackstone, remembers often exploring campus as a child. "The University was a wonderful and mysterious place to me then." Her years as a UW honors program student provide other memories. "By the time I moved into a dorm, much of the mystery was gone, but not the sense of adventure. I'd discovered the Theatre Department the summer before my freshman year, when I was cast as the maid in Blithe Spirit. I was immediately stage struck and haven't fully recovered, even 20 years later." Blackstone's enthusiasm led to her involvement in every UW production...as actress, stage manager, and designer and builder of scenery, props and costumes. She earned her master's in theatre at Kansas State University, again contributing to all areas of theatre production. Her broad knowledge made her an ideal stage manager, and she expanded her repertoire to stage managing opera. A graduate fellowship at Northwestern University led to a PhD in 1983. From her thesis on Buffalo Bill came a book, Buckskins, Bullets, and Business: A History of Buffalo Bill's Wild West. She has been on faculties at the University of Central Arkansas and the University of Washington's School of Drama. She currently heads the Graduate Program in Theatre at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, where she discovered and is inventorying the Sherman Theatre Collection, 187 cartons of melodrama and related material spanning 100 years. With grants from the Mid-America Theatre Conference and the National Endowment for the Humanities, her work will provide a priceless resource for theatre researchers and scholars. She's kept an award she earned at a football game as "the loudest UW Gm at an away game with CSU." Her trophy: a football signed by all the Cowboy players.