“The rejection was hard at first, but then Stacey realized, like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, that all she needed was to go home again.”

Q returned to her first love, roller skating, this time not as performer, but as teacher. She founded the Stacey Q Roll for Dignity, a non-profit that she ran alone, traveling to the nation’s most important impoverished neighborhoods in the inner cities, teaching urban youth the very same skate routines to the Shirley Temple songs like “On the Good Ship Lollipop” that she’d done herself as a child in Alaska.

And then the fall.

In an accident last June eeeily reminiscent of her tumble on The Brady Bunch Variety Hour, Q was attempting to keep up with some of her pupils as they took to their skateboards for some acrobatic stunts on some steps near a public fountain on the West Side of Chicago.

When the water unexpectedly came on, Q, age 59 and on vintage roller skates, instantly slipped in wet pavement as her skateboarding protégés tragically thought it was part of their lesson and began doing jumps over her as she writhed in pain on the ground.

X-rays determined numerous fractures as well as internal bleeding, the latter less a result of the fall than of one of her pupils missing a jump, but the real injury was to her heart.

Rip Taylor:

“Stacey had so many setbacks in her life. She thought she would be the next Shirley Temple. The next Eve Plumb. The next Liv Ullman. The next Gloria Gaynor. She was never at peace being the next Stacey Q.”

Taylor kept a bedside vigil next to his one-time almost-co-star as her condition worsened to the point that last week, the surviving members of The Facts of Life began making visits as she began floating in and out of consciousness.

“I knew it was goodbye,” explained a tearful Lisa Welchel, “when she kept calling me Blair. Then I realized she thought she was Cinnamon. Somehow that made it easier. I think Stacey was already gone, and In my mind, I’ve long ago said goodbye to the characters of Natalie, Tootie, and Jo. Bidding farewell to Cinnamon was much easier since she was o my in two episodes and the spin-off never even got off the ground.”

Q passed away quietly Friday morning with Taylor and Facts alum Kim Fields in each side, softly humming in unison the melody to the song that made the legend:

Two of Hearts.