IN MEMORIAM:  Peter Macris;

Glimmerglass, Foothills Founder

Editor’s Note:  Cooperstown’s Sam Goodyear has alerted us that Peter Macris, founder of Orpheus Theater, the Glimmerglass Opera and the Foothills Performing Arts Center, passed away early Saturday.  In recent years he has been living in Suffield, Conn., near his daughter. Funeral arrangements are incomplete.  Meanwhile, here is an appreciation of Macris that Goodyear delivered in 2008 at a testimonial for the giant figure in the development of Otsego County’s arts community.

PETER MACRIS: Man of the Arts

You remember where you were, if you were alive then, when you heard the news that John Kennedy had been assassinated. Similarly you remember where you were when you heard about the attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Catastrophes seem to make an indelible mark on us.

But there are happy markers, too. How about Man’s first landing on the Moon? That was a moment for wonder and celebration, all right, not to be forgotten. In that same category I put an evening in March of 1976, at my grandmother’s house at the north end of Otsego Lake. It was on that occasion that I met Peter and Ursula Macris.