Bailey Shaw, right, poses with her sister Fiona at the Aspen High School graduation commencement on Saturday. Shaw died unexpectedly on Tuesday, and is being remembered for her energy and passion for the performing arts.
The Aspen School District and theater community is mourning the loss of one of its rising stars all too soon.
Bailey Shaw, who graduated from Aspen High one week ago, died suddenly and unexpectedly in New York City on Tuesday night in what is believed to be an accidental fentanyl overdose. She was 18.
“Bailey got to (New York) and was just overjoyed to launch her new life,” her father Daniel Shaw said via phone on Thursday. “She was about one of the funniest people you would ever want to meet. She was an incredibly complex person who struggled at times but had really found her path and passion in the theater, in her community.”
Shaw, who had transitioned from Duncan Shaw, had just crossed the stage at the Michael Klein Music Tent last Saturday during AHS graduation and left for New York to begin an exciting internship with Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, a nonprofit fundraising organization. She was set to help with stage management for an event called Broadway Bares, an adult performance at the Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC, wanting to work for a while before going to college.
It was to be the culmination of Shaw’s work over the past year and before, making a lasting impression on all of Theatre Aspen/ASD theater program and The Arts Campus At Willits’ operations, excelling both behind the scenes and in front of the audience in the entertainment landscape.
“Just getting your foot in the door that way, getting in the room is incredible,” ASD Theater Technical Director Casey Trascik said. “I’ve had people that, when I left college, a lot of people went to New York and for a lot of them it was years before they got to even touch Broadway or off-Broadway working. I feel like that really speaks to who Bailey was: when she came into a room and when you met her and what she put out there, you knew this person was special and you wanted to snap them up.”
Shaw showed an unmatched enthusiasm for the performing arts and a talent for all aspects, from backstage work like stage managing and coordinating with artists and talent to performing herself, joining TACAW initially as a busker magic performer during COVID.
Shaw was a student of magician Doc Eason, a longtime performer at the former John Denver’s World-Famous Tower Comedy/Magic Bar in Snowmass. Eason called Shaw his “star student.”
“(Shaw) was an apt pupil that just picked up whatever I gave her like a sponge,” Eason said. “Just immersed herself in sleight of hand and had a wonderful library of contemporary magic tricks. Bailey just kind of shot way ahead of me on the learning curve.”
With Eason’s connection, Shaw performed at the Magic Castle in Los Angeles, a renowned private club just off Hollywood Boulevard. She was an alumni of Tannen’s Magic Camp in Pennsylvania.
Shaw was born in Aspen and attended local schools until eighth grade before going to a boarding school in California. She spent summers interning at TACAW and returned for her senior year, attending Aspen High.
After Bailey’s passing, Daniel Shaw emailed the high school to put out a notification to the community, which went out Wednesday morning. Her fellow graduates were already off campus following the graduation, but her loss was still felt in the halls.
In Wednesday evening’s Board of Education meeting, AHS Principal Sarah Strassburger led a moment of silence during public comment and said that the district had Aspen Hope Center on campus for counseling.
“While she was only at Aspen High School for a short time, she made an incredible impact on her peers and teachers,” Strassburger said via email on Thursday. “Her peers were so excited to see what she would accomplish, as was I. All of our hearts are broken that her life was cut short; she had so many gifts to offer this world.”
Bailey Shaw receives roses after stage managing the Theatre Aspen/Aspen School District production of “Anything Goes.”
Strassburger said the district honored National Fentanyl Awareness Day, discussed overdoses and Narcan in its Drug and Alcohol Awareness Club and had drug prevention education in its curriculum for ninth-graders.
Daniel Shaw — and other sources — noted how excited Bailey was for the next step in her life. He said there was no evidence to suggest that her death was anything but an accident. A request New York Police Department records on the incident returned no documents.
Shaw said he didn’t know where his daughter got the drugs that killed her — if she got them in New York or brought them from Aspen — and wasn’t certain what the drugs were. However, he was certain that it was an accidental dosage of fentanyl that caused her overdose, without having official results back yet.
“She was so excited about her life,” Daniel Shaw said. “She had dinner with friends of ours that night and she was just ready to go. There was no evidence that it was anything else but an accident. … Fentanyl is everywhere and all it really does take is one time, one mistake, one miscalculation and your life is over.”
With that one mistake, a lifetime full of promise for a goal to find her place in the world disappeared.
To many of the sources the Aspen Daily News spoke with for this story, that aspect is one of the hardest parts of the tragedy.
“It’s just so hard because I feel like in the time that I knew Bailey, I watched her find her tribe in the theater and performing arts world and find a group of people that understood her and appreciated her and valued her,” TACAW Executive Director Ryan Honey said. “TACAW was part of that family of people that honored her for who she was and her perspective and her skills and her talents, and it’s just crushing to have this accident put out that light.”
Bailey Shaw was set to begin an internship with a Broadway production this week before her sudden death from what is believed to be an accidental fentanyl overdose.
It wasn’t the first time fentanyl has had a tragic impact on school-aged kids in the Roaring Fork Valley, and is not likely to be the last.
In Glenwood Springs, Cath Adams started an awareness group called Aperture of Hope after her daughter Emily overdosed on a fentanyl-laced Percocet pill she acquired for a toothache. Aperture of Hope speaks at schools up and down the valley around National Fentanyl Awareness Day in early May.
“This is just my opinion, but (the local fentanyl situation) is definitely getting larger and larger, but I’m hoping going into the schools, they are more aware of it,” Adams said. “My whole goal behind this is not just for the kids, but for the parents and to not be afraid to have these conversations.”
Aperture of Hope places purple flags on school campuses across the Roaring Fork Valley in May to raise awareness of the dangers of fentanyl.
Aperture of Hope has resources available on its website including education on fentanyl and overdose treatment, at ApertureOfHope.com. If you suspect someone is experiencing a drug overdose or fentanyl poisoning, call 911.
Shaw is survived by her father, her mother Isa Catto and sister Fiona. Plans for services have not yet been made.
