Rose Pickering

As long as I've attended productions of the Milwaukee Repertory Theater, decades, Rose Pickering was there.

She passed away on Thanksgiving night.

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

To inspire herself before she went onstage, actress Rose Pickering would sometimes think about Brett Favre. But she could have taught him a few things about being an iron man.

Favre played only one position, quarterback, for a mere 20 seasons. No one has enough fingers and toes to count the number of roles Pickering played for the Milwaukee Repertory Theater during more than 35 seasons of performances.

As the longest-serving actress in the Rep's resident company, she played Amanda in "The Glass Menagerie," Lady Bracknell in "The Importance of Being Earnest," Elizabeth Proctor in "The Crucible" and title roles in "Juno and the Paycock," "The Matchmaker," "Miss Lulu Bett" and "Mother Courage," to cite a few of her declared favorites. She played wives, mothers, widows, ghosts, queens, murderers - and the occasional man.

Pickering, a fixture on local stages from 1973 until she took a leave in 2010 for medical treatment, died Thursday night of cancer. She was 64.

Pickering, who grew up in Delaware, met her husband and fellow Rep resident actor James Pickering in 1970 when they were both theater graduate students at Penn State. He joined the Rep company a year after she did. More than a dozen times, they played a married couple on stage. The Milwaukee Arts Board honored their work by giving them its Outstanding Artists Award in 1999.

For me, Rose Pickering was the heart of the Milwaukee Rep.

She was wonderful in comedies, possessing great comic timing, eliciting tremendous laughs from the audience with ease.

She was wonderful in dramatic roles, expressing a tremendous range of emotions with intensity and tenderness.

She was a treasure.

I can thank Rose Pickering for so many memorable moments, for enriching my life. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to experience theater with her.