it is 10:00 a.m. in the holy city of safed. I have been running around town for a couple of months buying craft supplies and second hand clothes to make costumes for a friend's play. the play is on Monday night. I am no longer speaking to my friend. we communicate through email texts. the word 'communicate' is used loosely here. she has not been communicating with me at all. I have been completely left out of the loop for most of this project. we had discussed the costume rehearsal, which was last night but we did not talk about full makeup. I had brought the props that I made the night before.
yes, I left my cooking job right after I served lunch and ran, I mean cabbed it to the rehearsal. first I went back home and fetched the washing machine prop I had made out of a medium sized carton. I then walked over to a friend's house on the next block and we cabbed it to the rehearsal which was in town. my, soon to be ex-friend, or current frenemy, kept telling me to read her script every time I asked a question about a costume or script. well, I finally found the perfect carton, applied white contact paper and duck taped the control panel into the carton. the panel was really too long but my gardner showed up unexpectedly, one morning and sawed off the extra piece for me.
I had ripped the control panel off of an abandoned washing machine I found in the neighborhood. the difficult part was finding a carton in tact. it had been raining non stop for over a month. the ironic part is that the script called for a dryer. I came up with a shtick. I tied together a couple of dozen single socks into a very long string for the actress to pull out of the dryer. I made a small hole in the middle of the large circle of the dryer, which I covered in tin foil. oh well....
I spent a fortune on these costumes. I bought pantyhose, socks, long johns and shoes for some of the actors. these guys weren't going to spend a nickel of their money. this is a mock community theater with no existing budget. my friend pays to play. I have been doing costumes and props for her for nearly 25 years. I had most of the costumes for her last play in my closet already, so it cost very little. this time I had to create looks from scratch. I am not a seamstress nor dressmaker. I find the right article of clothing and I embellish it. I do have a vision.
my friend of over 30 years has undermined my efforts throughout this entire process. even on the night of the dress rehearsal, she was listening to cast members disparage my vision. she asked me to supply her with a long black disheveled wig for her character. I had the perfect one in my closet. I bought it last year and never opened it. it was a witch's wig. the peanut gallery last night told her that her character had to be a blonde. she actually engaged with them. she didn't tell them that it was her choice to be a brunette for the show. one of the yenta's from the peanut gallery actually came over to me during the rehearsal to tell me, once again, that my friend needed to be a blonde.
I created a business type look for one of the young ladies. my friend had asked for a wall street type look. I immediately thought of a pinstriped suit. it was the obvious choice. I went online and saw that it was a stereotype of the 70's. I found a well made brown jacket and wanted to match it with a skirt and blouse. the actress is very statuesque. she is rather thin and 5ft 10in. she only wears maxi skirts and dresses. I wanted to create a modern tailored look for her but it was hard to find the right skirt. I found a very well made sleeveless woolen shift. the proprietress of a fancy clothing store in town actually matched the two pieces for me for 60 shekels. the shift only came down to the actress's' thigh. my friend wanted her to wear it like that with tights. the young actress was mortified. I ran around town to the material store and bought a piece of fabric to add to the dress. it wasn't the exact match. I then ran over to the store where I purchased the shift and asked the lady to add on the piece for me. I thought that she was going to recreate a slit in the back of the dress. she didn't. I could have sewn the piece on myself but I didn't know how to make a slit.
last night at the dress rehearsal, the actress liked lovely. she brought over some really awful looking woolen tights to wear under the shift. I had found some nice opaque hose for her to wear. she came out in black woolen knee socks. I told her to remove them. I thought she looked classy and business like. my friend thought she looked frumpy and ultraorthodox like. she told her to open the jacket to look like Audrey Hepburn. it had no look at all with the jacket open. I told the actress to close the jacket. my friend said she didn't like it that way. I told her that my fashion eye was the one that mattered. she didn't agree with me.
in the meanwhile, my friend came out for her first scene in the wrong wig. she actually fought me when I tried to correct her. she couldn't tell the difference between a crazy disheveled witch's wig from a fancy curly one with bangs. I brushed the curly wig and cut off some of the tangled curls before I gave it back to her. I even helped her get dressed for her last scene. she had no idea how to put them on. I had picked them out for her at the open air market a couple of weeks before with her.
it was probably, the worst night ever last night. I started out feeling fluish in the morning. I took a hot shower and popped a dexamol. I cabbed it to work with two suitcases and four shopping bags of costumes. I was desperately sewing trim onto one of the costumes and I couldn't see what I was doing. I cooked for about 4 hours at the yeshiva and did all of the wash up before I cabbed it to the dress rehearsal. when I got there my friend was ready for a fight. she showed me the dressing room. it was dark. I didn't want to enter with all of my things until she found the light switch. she was angry with me. I found someone to turn on the light and started to arrange everyone's costumes. she threw her stuff all around the room and couldn't find anything. I had everyone else's costumes down to the pantyhose organized by character.
I even donned a costume to stand in at the end of the play for an absentee player. I did all of this to help her out. and yet she treated me like I was her biggest enemy. I stuck around long enough to reorganize all of the costumes including hers for the show on Monday night. I made a list of the props and costumes that I need to alter. this is my swan song. I will not be helping her out again. I am done.
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