Pat was born on December 4, 1931 in Muskegon, Michigan. Her father was a real estate and stock entrepreneur who owned most of Detroit before the stock market crash. Her mother had five children, one of whom died of tuberculosis when Pat was a child, and worked three shifts a day as a waitress after the death of her husband to support them. Pat tested positive for tuberculosis for the rest of her life.

Her photo appeared in the local paper when, as a religious teenager, she carved a snowman into a realistic statue of Christ holding a small child on his lap. She later attended Central Bible College, where she engaged in many arguments with Jim Bakker about whether it was morally right to devote her vocal talent to classical rather than religious music. Pat’s subsequent 13 years with the Dallas Civic Opera Chorus show how successful Jim was at dissuading her from classical music.

While performing with the Dallas Opera, Pat shared the stage with luminaries including Maria Callas under directors including Franco Zeffirelli and Milos Forman (Carmina Burana, 1969). The opera was not only impressed with her voice–Maestro Mola’s wife once told her, “If the Archangel Gabriel doesn’t sound exactly like you, I’m not going!”–but also with her ability to cry on command. She later used this talent against unhelpful airline employees and financial aid officers to devastating effect.

In 1963, Pat married a fellow singer, Mike Villyard. Mike attended the University of North Texas, where he and his friend Scott “the Rip!” Ripley used to paint “BOPGA” on theatrical flats to promote their imaginary organization, the Boy Opera Producer’s Guild of America. On a tour of UNT in the 1990s, Mike was delighted to find flats still inscribed with the BOPGA logo. Pat and Mike had two children, Katherine and Cynthia, whom they started taking to choral practice at the age of six weeks. At first, motherhood only slowed Pat’s musical production down in the sense that she was required to give up the lead in a production of The King and I due to pregnancy. During a church production of Amahl and the Night Visitors, rather than hiring a sitter or asking to include her children in the production, Pat sewed little shepherd costumes for them and brought them onstage, all but daring the director to challenge her. She later admitted that the director grumbled, but no one told her she couldn’t include two and three year old Cynthia and Katherine in the production. Sadly, Cynthia’s professional opera debut at the age of five, playing Trouble in Madame Butterfly, was interrupted by Mike being stationed in Tacoma, Washington.

Pat didn’t find a compatible musical community in Tacoma, so she took up painting, crochet, and knitting and sent her daughters to ballet and hula lessons. She later found herself in Ogden, Utah, and Germany. Pat dragged her husband and children to just about every museum, art gallery, or historical site on the continent, from the Uffizi and the Colosseum to the British Museum and the Tower of London. She made no attempt to shield her daughters’ eyes from Michelangelo’s David, but drew the line at the brothel in Pompeii–which was just as well, as they didn’t allow women or children to see the wall paintings there in the 1970s, anyway. Pat encouraged her children to take piano, dance, and perform in community theater. She also raised them to believe in religious tolerance; she believed that it wasn’t her place to argue with another person’s relationship with God.

In 1980, Pat’s marriage–long unhappy–dissolved. Pat found herself a displaced homemaker in Dallas, working as a receptionist for $11,000 a year with children to support. Pat went back to college at night, earning a bachelor’s degree from the University of Texas at Dallas in 1986 at the age of 54. Pat took fifteen semester hours at night while working 40 hours a week for less than $20,000 a year. Her daughters remember her vacuuming the living room in a suit at midnight with a sandwich in one hand–on more than one occasion. Pat always said, “If I can do it, anyone can!” Her daughters regarded this statement with skepticism.

In 1995, at the age of 64, Pat bought her first house in her own name. She retired soon after, paying off her home with her lump settlement from Pepsico/Frito-Lay. In 2003, she won the Miss Mature Denton County beauty pageant; her talent was singing Habanera. She was interviewed for the Denton newspaper at that time. She explained that her love of Opera comes from it encompassing all the other art forms (dance, theater, visual art), and added, “And you get to dress up in costumes and traipse around!” This quote was shortened by someone at the paper to, “Pat enjoys Opera because of all the ‘traipsing’ it allows her to do.”

Pat sold her house in 2008 and moved to Albuquerque. She only lived there for six months before passing away. She was 77 years old. She’s survived by her daughters, Katherine and Cynthia, her sister Peggy, her granddaughters Izzi and Maya, her son-in-law Chris, and her nephews Mac and Vance.

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