Glynn Bedington (1949-2011)
(formerly Ginny-Lynn Safford)

With the same grace, elegance and courage with which she lived, Glynn Bedington died at sunset on Friday August 26, 2011 at San Diego Hospice, surrounded by friends and family. In her six decades, Glynn Bedington lived a life so big, rich and full that many who knew her (and therefore loved her) knew only a part of the amazing force of nature she embodied. Her acclaimed and award-winning professional accomplishments as an actor, director, producer, playwright, author, teacher, coach, mentor, entrepreneur, and community activist fill a 38-page CV, an awe-inspiring overview of her multi-faceted achievements. Beyond that, Glynn was a deeply spiritual being, whose greatest work was the creation and nurturing of her family, her husband and the love of her life, Paul, her beloved daughters, Guyanna and Andelyn, and an interconnected web of friends and admirers all over the world.

Born Ginny Lynn Sehloff in Mishicot, Wisconsin on November 17, 1949, she began acting at the age of seven, touring for six years with a children’s theatre company based in Sheboygan Falls, and continued studying theatre in high school. In her first year of college, when she was 19, her immediate family, parents Chuck and Judy, and her young brother Ronnie, all died tragically, a devastating loss she rarely talked about. She met her first husband, Ross Safford, as a theatre student at the University of Wisconsin. After earning a Master of Arts in Theatre from the University of Colorado in 1976, she worked in Denver as a professional actor, voice-over artist and helped create Centre Stage Productions, a theatre skills training facility where she first began teaching “Acting for Lawyers.”

For more than a quarter century beginning in 1979, Glynn applied her theatre skills to her own successful company,Presentation Consultants,as an acting and executive presentation coach, courtroom behaviorist, legal consultant, speaker and writer. She was a featured speaker/trainer for dozens of national legal and business organizations, on the founding faculty of the New York State Defenders Association Trial Skills Program, and served as Adjunct Professor at the former Western School of Law (now Thomas Jefferson School of Law) and the University of San Diego School of Law. She authored two books, several articles, and produced video and audio training materials. Even after her diagnosis last year she helped develop and lead a life-changing program for women lawyers called Courtroom Courage, in the words of her colleague attorney Roberta Nieslanik, “to bring light, learning and compassion to the most difficult part of the justice system, criminal defense work” Yet, with a twinkle in her eye, Glynn often referred to her presentation work as her “waitress job” to support her theatre habit.

Arriving in San Diego in 1980 as a divorcee beginning a new life, she was soon immersed in the burgeoning theatre scene. Her first roles were at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre and at the Old Town Opera House, where she made lifelong friendships. She joined Spontaneous Combustion, an improvisational group, replacing the departing Whoopi Goldberg. Over the next three decades, despite a hiatus during the 1990s to run her own theatre company, Ensemble Arts Theatre, and raise her daughters, she appeared on stage in more than two dozen roles at The Bowery, Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company, 6th and Penn, Compass, San Diego Rep, North Coast Rep, Cygnet, Intrepid, Diversionary, and at Lamb’s Players, where she found a special theatrical home. Soon after Glynn returned to the stage in 2005, she won the San Diego Critics Award for her role as Birdie in “The Little Foxes” at Cygnet, in which she was “more radiant, intelligent and just plain beautiful than ever. Motherhood had deepened and matured her as an artist,” says theatre critic Anne Marie Welsh, who first saw Glynn on stage when they both lived in Denver. In 2009, Glynn’s acting career reached its zenith with her “pitch perfect” portrayal of Martha in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” for which she won the Patte Award for Outstanding Performance.

Glynn’s directing and producing career was no less stellar. In 1989, Glynn, Paul and several others, including Production Manager Maria Mangiavellano, founded Ensemble Arts Theatre (EAT) to produce new international theatre in San Diego while touring their own productions to international venues. During EAT’s ten producing years, they toured to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe two separate years with three different productions. In 1991 the San Diego Union profiled the top seven theatre directors in San Diego, a short list that included Jack O’Brien, Des McAnuff, and only one woman: Glynn Bedington. An America West Magazine profile in 1992 noted that Glynn was “one of a handful of women anywhere in live drama with full creative responsibility. She avoids simplistic narratives,preferring instead multidimensional issue-oriented material with spiritual overtones. Her knack for reappraising traditional material with a hip, feminist eye have helped put the itinerant Ensemble Arts Theatre on the map.”

As EAT’s artistic director, Glynn produced and/or directed more than 15 shows, and co-produced another 10. She organized staged play readings, 42 of them. She wrote four plays for children on water conservation, which EAT toured in schools statewide, providing reliable work for local actors who performed nearly 3,000 shows over six years. After renting space from other groups, EAT finally found a home in an intimate 45-seat theatre in Golden Hill’s Art Union Building, until EAT finally closed in 1999. Glynn directed more than 35 stage productions in San Diego, at North Coast Repertory Theatre, The Pacific Chamber Opera, San Diego Gilbert and Sullivan Society, Laterthanever Productions, and San Diego Junior Theatre where she directed daughters Guyanna and Andelyn (as Scout) in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The production went on to win two National Youth Theatre Awards in 2007 for Outstanding Director and Outstanding Ensemble.

In 1984, Glynn met Paul Bedington, a tall blond Canadian architect from Toronto, and nine months later they married on a 5th Ave rooftop overlooking San Diego. In August of 1985, they visited England and received a blessing ceremony in a 900-year-old Norman church. When Ensemble Arts was formed a few years later, Paul became the theatre’s Managing Director, and their home the fledgling company’s office, rehearsal hall and dormitory. The name change, from Ginny-Lynn Safford to Glynn Bedington, came in 1991, part of a decision to reclaim and refocus their lives, with the idea to start a family. On November 29, 1992, with less than 24-hours notice,they adopted Guyanna Leigh Bedington on her 6-month birthday. On July 22, 1995, they attended the birth of their second daughter, Andelyn May MacFarlane Bedington, and welcomed her home that day.

Her family became Glynn’s masterpiece. With a boldness of spirit, which Paul always found “intoxicating to be around” and a faith that everything would work out, she embraced the societal challenges of raising a family with different heritages and races. “Since we weren’t tied to our own biology, we thought we’d branch out a bit,” she said in an interview with KPBS’s ON AIR magazine. Glynn homeschooled both girls for several years, and took both daughters to Washington DC to participate in the democratic process, to the Million Mom March and other events. Guyanna is now 19, studying dance at Stage 7 with a view to being a professional dancer, while Andelyn continues in high school.

Glynn and Paul shared a joy of travel.They often travelled frequently to London, Glynn’s favorite place, where they briefly shared ownership of an apartment on the Kensington High Street. The family journeyed to Vienna, Paris and Italy, Canada and Mexico, got to know Hawaii, and cruised to Alaska. For one month in 2004, they ventured around New Zealand in a rented camper van, dreaming of living there.

Glynn was an ebullient practitioner of alternative medicine, home gardening, organic foods, knitting and hand crafts, numerology and Feng Shui, which she studied with two masters. She jumped into major home improvement projects with Paul, and served her community as a board member of the San Diego Voters Forum, the Waldorf School of San Diego, Sacred Traditions (a summer camp for girls), and San Diego Ecology Center. She explored Buddhism, and was an open-minded student of non-traditional belief systems.A member of SUBUD, she lived consciously, always aware of receiving the blessings of the universe, and with a sense of joyful calm that made her seem to glow. As one of the participants of Courtroom Courage wrote, Glynn “was just one of those who shook up the earth as she moved.”

When, on the day before Thanksgiving 2010, Glynn was diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer, which had spread to her brain and lungs, she approached the cancer as she had every other challenge: by learning as much as possible about alternative methods to traditional treatment, to understanding the physical and spiritual process, and then following her own path of treatment. Glynn truly enjoyed the last year of her life, staying connected with her many good friends, acting in a short film for the web, keeping up with the book club she and Paul joined 18 years ago, traveling to Mexico, reading in her garden, and taking walks with friends in her scenic neighborhood. At the end, she died surrounded by the great love she engendered, without pain or painkillers, at peace with the world.

written by Kathi Diamant

A Celebration of Glynn’s life is scheduled at 10 am on Saturday, October 15, 2011 at Lamb’s Players Theatre, Coronado, CA.

 

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