Kate Fleming (left) and her wife, Charlene Strong, were wed in a commitment ceremony nearly nine years ago. (Photo courtesy of Charlene Strong)
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ELIZABETH A. PERRY
Friday, January 19, 2007
The Washington D.C. theater community said goodbye to one of its own during a memorial service Monday for a lesbian actress and voiceover artist who lived and worked here for several years in the early 1990s after growing up in the area, and died last month in a flood at her Seattle home.
Kate Fleming was best known for her work as narrator of more than 250 audiobooks under the name Anna Fields but locals remember her fondly as a fixture for years in local gay theater. Fleming died Dec. 14 after getting trapped in rising water in a home recording studio. The local memorial was held at Woolly Mammoth Theatre on D Street where she had performed.
“We all still feel so connected to her and feel a profound sense of loss,” said Deb Gottesman, who acted with Fleming. “She transformed this community in many ways and she will always be remembered here.”
Elizabeth Pringle, who also acted with Fleming in several productions and served as mistress of ceremonies for the memorial called her a “vibrant presence.”
“She performed with the Washington Shakespeare Company where she played Banquo, a male role in MacBeth” said Pringle. “They did cross-over casting and she was brilliant. She performed a huge range of roles — the Red Queen in ‘Alice in Wonderland,’ a 15-year-old girl in ‘Make Way for Dyklings’ at the Consenting Adults Theater Company.”
The memorial featured an audio-visual program and included slides and video of Fleming’s local performances. Howard Shalwitz, owner of Woolly Mammoth, opened and closed the service with his memories of Fleming. Former girlfriend Bernadette Flagler read a piece about Fleming’s spirit and wit, while actresses Sarah Marshall and Nancy Robinette gave readings about her.
A group of her friends also sang “Old Friends” from Stephen Sondheim’s “Merrily We Roll Along.” Also on hand was Pat Sheehy, former artistic director of The Source Theater, where Fleming made her debut. Fleming’s mother, Audrey, and seven siblings attended along with neighbors from Alexandria, Va., where Fleming was born and raised, as well as several of her College of William and Mary classmates.
Fleming graduated from T.C. Williams High School in 1983 and from William and Mary in 1987. She went on to study with the Actors Theatre of Louisville and then moved to New York before returning to the D.C. area.
She moved to Seattle in 1994 to continue her acting career and begin a new one as a voice-over artist. She got her start as a narrator of books with Seattle Talking Book and Braille Library. She went on to record hundreds of books for publishers including Harper, Time Warner, Random House and BBC Audiobooks America and won numerous awards for her work. She was eulogized on National Public Radio as “one of the country’s most talented narrators of audiobooks.”
‘I couldn’t save Kate’
She met her partner of 10 years, Charlene Strong, when she began volunteering with the Pet Project, an organization that cares for pets of people with AIDS. Strong ran the pet clinic and was in need of volunteers when she and Fleming met. The women, who were married in a commitment ceremony in the back yard of Fleming’s parents’ house in Virginia, shared their Catholic faith and love of animals.
“I will never meet anyone like her again in my life and I know that,” Strong said. “That’s what saddens me.”
Strong is no stranger to emotional struggles. The Mississippi native helped resettle her mother, brother and sister-in-law in Seattle after Hurricane Katrina destroyed their Pass Christian home in 2005. In the month since her partner died, Strong is still trying to make sense of it all.
“I did everything I could to get my family here but I couldn’t save Kate,” she said. “I was trying to get her out of the basement and I couldn’t get her out.”
Strong was visiting a friend a mile away when a rapid current of floodwaters breached a retaining wall at the top of a hill near their home in Madison Valley, a Seattle neighborhood. As water poured into the basement recording studio in their small cottage home, Fleming ran down the stairs to save her recording equipment and became trapped. Strong tried in vain to rescue her partner, who was under water for 15 minutes before firefighters cut a hole through the bedroom floor and pulled her out. She died later at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle with Strong by her side.
If Strong had been her legal spouse, the decisions that came next would have been made quickly, albeit painfully. But Strong was initially denied the right to visit Fleming in the hospital as she lay dying. When asked what relationship she had to Fleming, Strong told the truth, unwilling to lie and say they were sisters.
“A social worker called Kate’s sister to get approval for me to be back there,” she said. “Once I was allowed back, the hospital was amazing. They never denied me the ability to make decisions about whether they should continue to perform CPR or let her go.”
Things were not easier at the funeral home, where Strong was unable to legally approve the cremation request. Strong then found that her homeowner’s insurance refused to honor her claim because the house was involved in a flood. She does have a few rights, including right of survivorship on the house and a life insurance policy on Fleming, but she is also stuck paying off a mortgage on a house that was destroyed.
“Two weeks before she died we were talking about making a will,” Strong said. “She said what kind of funeral Mass she wanted and that she wanted half of her ashes with me and half buried by her father in Alexandria. In terms of having our ducks in a row, we were working on that. That’s what we were going to give each other for Christmas.”
Strong, who manages a dental practice and is studying interior design at Bellevue Community College, said she wants to follow Fleming’s example and be a “calm voice in the world.” She also wants to work to advance the cause of gay rights in the state.
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