Remembering Roberta
ROBERTA MEYERS passed away recently, taking with her secrets and stories yet untold. Her memories and experiences over decades in Taos, were willingly shared time and again by Meyers who was an extremely talented storyteller.
Growing up here, Roberta Courtney Meyers arrived at her love of storytelling through the Celtic folk songs played by her Celtic fiddler paternal grandfather. She went on to become a musician and composer before discovering her place in the theatre.
Meyers was at one time married to the late Taos artist Ouray Meyers. His parents, Ralph and Rowena Meyers, are two well-known personalities in the modern history of Taos, most especially Ralph, who author Frank Waters wrote about in “The Man Who Killed the Deer,” as Rodolfo Byers, who ran the local trading post. Ralph and Rowena were close friends of Mabel and Tony Luhan’s, and Meyers met Mabel Dodge Luhan through her in-laws. As a young woman, she often visited Luhan with Rowena Meyers.
A self-proclaimed historian and trained thespian, Meyers wrote music, poetry, a musical comedy and a one-woman show about Mabel Dodge Luhan: “Dialogue with a Ghost – Mabel’s Story,” which had its 1982 premiere in Denver. When the Harwood held its successful traveling exhibit about Luhan in 2016, Meyers approached the museum about reviving “Dialogue with a Ghost.”
“I went to the Harwood Museum’s Mabel Dodge Luhan exhibition quite a few times,” said Meyers. “I wanted to give my point of view since I knew Mabel personally.”
Meyers’ two-part event started with the “Stroll with Mabel Dodge Luhan”which began at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House. Meyers talked about “the walk Mabel used to take through the park in the evening when the old post office was on Kit Carson Road. Mabel’s book, ‘Winter in Taos,’ begins that way.”
Along the way, audience members learned how Luhan came to be buried next to Ralph Meyers (Roberta’s fatherin-law) in the cemetery. “She is buried
in Ralph’s grave. They moved him over. They were close friends,” Meyers explained. Meyers would re-enact other colorful characters from Taos’ past: Georgia O’Keeffe, Frieda Lawrence and Dorothy Brett. “I knew Brett the best because she lived the longest,” Meyers
would divulge.
The second part of the event was Meyers’ performance of “Dialogue with a Ghost.”
Meyers had a long history of presenting Mabel Dodge Luhan onstage. She wrote a musical comedy that included many of Luhan’s cohorts, including Pablo Picasso and Carl Jung. “I wrote that musical for Taos. We performed it in 1978 and 1984. “We built a seven-level stage because there was a lot of music and dance. That show was called ‘I Want It All.’”
Her fascination with Mabel Dodge Luhan and her crowd, culminated in a memoir titled “Mabel and Me.”
I got to know Roberta Meyers a little in 2016, when I began attending the Tuesday evening support group that Holy Cross Hospital oversees through their Cancer Support Services. Meyers was already battling the disease that ultimately claimed her life. She put up a fierce and brave fight, amazing all of us with her tenacity and endurance; her son would ostensibly be there as her support and caretaker, but clearly Meyers was still in charge.
She was funny, articulate and supportive of others in the group, myself included, and I recall I’d worry and miss her on the Tuesdays she chose not to come. I left the group after almost a year; my cancer went into remission where it remains. Meyers was not so lucky, but she fought on.
She once reminded me that she had written about much more than Mabel, pointing out the fact that she had been a recipient of a Grant of the National Endowment for the Arts, and wrote, produced, and directed “Coyote Cobwebs Dream” which was performed all over the Southwest and at the Smithsonian in D.C. She started and ran the “Moonfire Gallery” which she opened in 1970, giving her then-husband, Ouray, an outlet for his art, and continued writing articles all of her life, many for the Taos News.
“I knew Ouray much better,” says Joan Pond, “but I thought Roberta did a really good job of being Mabel and Frieda.”
“She was quite a storyteller,” Pond continued. “She researched them both and since I grew up with both, I thought she really captured them.
“I grew up with Ray (Ouray) at Mabel’s. His dad was a really good friend of hers,” Pond remembers.
Roberta Meyers and her stories will always be a part of the place she called home.