Mary Bunting

I’ve been blessed to know a few people who could take something that most of us dread…. “Aging,” and turn it into an art. People who the rest of can look at and say, “Yeah, that’s how it’s done.” And this had more to do with their outlook on life than their physiology. Mary Bunting was chief among them.

Of course it helps a lot if you happen to be married to a man who appears onstage after his retirement age, continues to be the go-to man in you community, and raises llamas. And it says something about a marriage when your names become a single word. Tom and Mary.

Mary once told me that anyone can fall in love with a man, but it really helps if you like him, too. She did.

We did a production of the musical, Quilters, just after Jon Robb died. Mary played the leading role of the mother. It was an all-female cast. My first all-female. I learned a lot. Quickly. A young girl who was a student of mine was in the cast. The Buntings invited us to their hacienda in the country for a cast party and as the girl got in my car to come home, she said, “Well, I’m going to have to put off marriage for a while.” I asked her why. “Where am I ever going to find a relationship like the Buntings?”

I’ve only known a few actors like Mary…when you watched her onstage, even though you’d never met her…you knew her. She was a fine actress, but whether she was playing the head nun in Sound of Music or Nettie Fowler singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” or a pioneer woman fighting blizzards, you could see the gentleness in her spirit…her compassion. She was too good of a person to be too good of an actress.

Cliches are clichés because they’re true, and although it may sound like a cliché, people like Mary change us. You cannot have known Mary Bunting and remain the same. And so I’m glad that you brought her back to us, Tom….because we’re the ones whose lives are still being affected because we knew her.