Where next for Anne Basting’s revolution in dealing with aging? The MacArthur Foundation named 23 new fellows in September, including Basting, a theater professor at UW-Milwaukee who has quietly tended to a radical change in how we understand the process. Her novel approach, now furthered by the nonprofit TimeSlips, emphasizes storytelling and creativity in the lives of people with memory and other cognitive problems, focusing less on just remembering. The $625,000, no-strings-attached grant and publicity it brings are like “a happy piano that falls on your head,” she says. The foundation alerts its new fellows several days before the announcement, and each can tell just one person. Basting told her husband, Brad Lichtenstein, a documentary filmmaker. “I think we both cried,” she says. “I fought to get recognition for this work for a long time.” In October, Basting described ways her work could now proceed. She’s long thought about how creativity could piggyback on the widespread Meals on Wheels program, and an enormously scaled-up version of her Penelope Project, a collaborative theater performance that engaged an entire care home, is in the planning stages. It would encompass 60-some facilities and might use the story of Peter Pan to explore “the meaning and value of childhood at any time,” she says. A woman who participated in the original project gave feedback that still rings in Basting’s ears: “It’s the last meaningful thing I’ll do in my life.” Those are the kinds of experiences she wants to facilitate in the future. “BINGO is great,” she says. However, “There’s a human right to have meaning and purpose in your life.”
Anne Basting. Photo by Adam Ryan Morris.
Silver Stories
Anne Basting’s work on aging nets the title of “genius” and over $600,000.
