obituaries

Andrue Scott of Minneapolis could name that tune and a whole lot more when it came to opera and musical theater.

Scott, who once managed the music department of a downtown Minneapolis bookstore and who had produced a show or two of his own, died on Saturday in Minneapolis of cancer as a result of complications from HIV-AIDS.

Scott, a collage artist, was 59.

"You didn't come in for a recommendation from Andrue. You would get a full mini-course in opera history," said Alison Aten, a friend of Scott's and a former employee of the Minneapolis Barnes and Noble where Scott worked as music manager from the early 1990s until 1996.

"He had it all right in his head," Aten said. "He had an encyclopedic brain about dates, cast members and individual recordings."

Scott, a New York native, graduated from New York's Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts in 1966 and earned a bachelor's degree in music performance at New York University about 1970.

After some theater and stage work in New York City, he migrated to New Orleans. In the late 1980s, he wrote and directed a play there called "Sing Sister Sing," about the Boswell Sisters, a singing trio from New Orleans who came to prominence in the years before World War II.

Scott had told Aten that he left New York because "he was sick of reading the obits every day" about his friends dying of AIDS, she said.

He moved to the Twin Cities in 1992, working in a couple of music stores, writing theater criticism for magazines and establishing himself as a collage artist.

He showed his collages at Butler Square in Minneapolis for six years, until the spring of 2005.

By then, illness had laid him low. A year earlier, part of his left leg had been amputated because of an infection.

Cracking wise, he had asked a friend to wheel him down to a music store a few days after his surgery.

"Just because I lost my leg doesn't mean I lost my ability to shop," he said in an April 22, 2005, article in the Star Tribune.

John Drozdal, a former Minneapolis resident now living in Albuquerque, N.M., met Scott 14 years ago.

"I walked in one lunchtime on a weekday, looking for one opera. I left with 10 operas and a new friend," Drozdal said.

Scott told him: "You have to have this, or life won't be complete," Drozdal said. "Andrue Scott was the most unforgettable character I have ever met."

Scott was opinionated, direct and big-hearted all at once and made friends all the time.

He would say to Drozdal: "I respect other people's opinion, wrong though they may be."