How the Bug Bit Me

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advertising, antiques, fashion, film, Galena, museum, painting, parades, period costumes, sewing

We’ve all heard about the fairy godmother. I had a fey aunt. She had the broad, capable hands and blunt fingers of our German ancestors. With them, Aunt Marie created magic, in paintings, clothes, costumes, sculptures, parades, pageants, Santa Claus Houses, and in 1957, a museum, The Old General Store, known as far away as Russia. From her, I developed a love of history and the understanding that we must nurture whatever talents we’ve been given.

Marie Louise Duerrstein was born just after the turn of the last century in the Northern Illinois village of Guilford, approximately ten miles away from Galena. Television was decades away. Entertainments were homegrown. Mom and Aunt Marie played in the Small Pox Creek with their three other sisters. They made up games, hiked the spectacular countryside, had picnics, and dressed up strange costumes. Their first car, the Jumpin’ Jive, got reupholstered in lively colors, and its wheels painted yellow, and took them laughing and bouncing over the country back roads.

Mom always longed for her youth in Guildford, but Aunt Marie had dreams. Galena was close enough and just the right size for her head full of ideas. She became a seamstress, sold paintings, and asked the old-timers about Galena history. From Grandma Swing, (no relation and over a hundred), Aunt Marie heard about Lincoln campaigning in Galena, at that time, a boomtown three times its present size. The original buildings on Main Street are still standing, something she fought to preserve.

Until the dike was built in the nineteen-fifties, every spring the town flooded. Merchandise was moved to the top floors, a lot of it forgotten. Aunt Marie told the  owners that she would clean out the top floors if she could keep what she found. She unearthed, cleaned, and repaired enough to open The General Store, where nothing was for sale. She dubbed it “A Step into the Past,” and it felt like it when you walked through the door with its tinkling bell. Later, she expanded, adding an office, tavern, WC, and living quarters. The kerosene lamps worked, the pot-bellied stove and range in the living quarters supplied heat. The apples and crackers in the barrels were real, the food on the dining table, the cookies and hard candies in the jars. She made the mannequins and dressed them in clothes from the eighteen-eighties. People came from all over the world to hear her talk about Galena history.

Her apartment was stacked to the ceiling with labeled boxes filled with ribbons, fans, underwear, celluloid collars, waistcoats, and hats. When film crews came to town, they stopped to talk to her first. Her collection of period clothes provided for a fashion show and helped costume more than one film, but what I loved the most was her sly humor when Halloween rolled around. My favorite of her many costumes was the year she made the Two-Faced Couple. Mom was in a dress, halved, so the front was the same as the back. Masks had the same face on both sides. Aunt Marie dressed as the man—the shoes had no backs, only fronts, the same as her clothes. When she and Mom walked in the grand march at the Turner Hall party, Aunt Marie walked backwards, and you couldn’t tell. Her shoes, clothes, gloves and hat were exactly the same on both sides.

To follow are some photos. (Forgive my lack of expertise and impatience with the creation of an interesting layout.) The first is an early painting (with the use of perspective and highlighting that I needed private lessons to understand), high school picture, as an extra in the film “Gaily Gaily, and Mom in the fashion show, in a duster walking her dog, Orby.

Like a Pied Piper, she badgered people into helping her create pageants and parades. She wanted Santa to be real and every year did what she could to keep him alive with a “house” where children could sit on his lap, tell him their wishes, and get a cookie. Funding for all of her projects came from handmade donation containers Galena merchants kept by the registers.

Since I followed her around, there no was no chance of staying idle. She slapped a paintbrush in my hand, dressed me up and put me to work in the museum, showed me how to make a life-sized elephant, used me as a model whenever a newspaper or magazine came to interview and photograph the museum. Her mantra was “never pay for advertising,” and yet the store ended up in regional and national newspapers and magazines. Her last project was her undoing—a fashion show with period clothes. A stroke followed, but before it hit, she said she had another idea, this time, about a circus, but she had difficulty with vision and talking afterwards. There were no more Santa Houses and parades. Galena evolved without her into a haven for artists and one of the few historic sites in the US left intact.

I have no doubt that Aunt Marie is in heaven, arranging for some event, having fun with her sisters, and finally able to create the ideas and visions that were too big for this too small world.

 

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Shakespeare and Me

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costumes, crew, embarrassment, humiliation, malfunction, period costumes, stage, theater

Embarrassing moments. We all suffer them. My most excruciating ones get written into a plot. Some poor, schmuck character gets hit upside the head with one of my humiliating life experiences and poof, I forget about it—a sort of emotional enema. Hey, it works, but I have one experience left that is so pathetic and ridiculous and hysterically funny that it’s a keeper for one of my characters. I think kick-butt heroine Phil Hafeldt is getting the honors in her next adventure. She’s quirky and tough enough to get through it. I still can’t think about it without laughing and cringing at the same time.

A less devastating but funny occurrence happened on stage at Racine Theatre Guild—and thanks to all the Powers that be everywhere in the universe—it happened during rehearsal and not during an actual performance. But the discomfort lingers.

Eons ago, I did a lot of comedy, so got somewhat accustomed to unexpected wrenches sabotaging the works. Audiences rarely know the mayhem that happens behind the scenes, horrible accidents, broken bones and sprains, costumes that come apart, props that disappear, sets that collapse, an endless set of catastrophes that marvelous crews save, correct, stitch, and paste back together so the performers can be shoved back out in front of the audience. I can’t imagine the trauma if my calamity had played out in front of patrons. Actors, crew and the director (Norman McPhee) got the brunt of it.

Tech reheasal, two nights before full dress, and our first night on the actual set, Petruccio (Jim Iaquinta) drags me by one arm, a violently resisting shrew, Kate, up the balcony steps. He gets a foot on the balcony and the entire staircase collapses. I’m swinging in the air, worrying about the crew, running with arms outstretched. In period costume, I’m also hoping I haven’t worn skimpy underwear, while praying Petruccio can hold on, so I don’t fall and crush the nice carpenters. (I’ve never been a lightweight.)

Petruccio hauls me up, asks me if I’m OK, takes my numb-brained nod as a yes, and goes on with his lines. His next blocking move is to throw me over his shoulder. Now it’s an even longer drop to the stage floor. He isn’t afraid of heights, so he stands with the tips of his toes off the edge of a balcony with no railing. I screamed so horribly people came running from everywhere in building. Meanwhile, Petruccio’s still delivering his lines and the director is gleefully shouting: Now, that’s how I want you to scream! (To be honest, I did use a rendition of that scream every performance.)

That was the set up for the impending humiliation, but not the first warning. That came when the costume lady takes me into the bathroom—which had me wondering why not the wardrobe room—and tells me all of my costumes have to be altered. The director wants to make use of the rack I downplayed with minimizer bras my entire life. I dutifully get into the wedding costume. She takes a scissors and hacks out a chunk of the bodice. I shriek, horrified and gob-struck. (Think da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine but much lower.)

Next night is dress rehearsal. The staircase has been tacked back together and now, thankyouthankyou, has a railing. We get up to the balcony, lines and timing are going great, Petruccio slings me over his shoulders. I inhale to scream with appropriate gusto, and my boobs fall out of the gown. Wardrobe malfunction? Uh-no. More like wardrobe catastrophe.

The director can’t see what’s happening beyond my butt in the air and me furiously wriggling to reinsert my bosoms. He knows something is going on because the two actors to one side of the balcony are now rolling on the floor with laughter. There’s just so damn much of me that it takes FOREVER to get them back in place and hold them there. In comparison, it wasn’t quite as humiliating as the debacle I’m saving for Phil, but maybe now I can forget those guys, holding their sides, laughing their heads off.

Solution/moral of the story: Every night I surgical-glued my tatas into a cut down bra and ripped it off after performances. I lost a lot of skin but saved a lot of face.

I could caption this What We Do For Our Art or Was I Ever That Young?

 

 

 

 

 

You Can’t Make Me Wear That Corset

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corsets, Gary Cooper, Hugh Laurie, Ingrid Bergman, period costumes, stays, Victorian

If you can believe it—conscientious mothers in the nineteenth century strapped their little girls into corsets. Healthy support clothing for kids, or so physicians thought at the time. Huh. Go figure. (Oops, sorry about that.)

Anyway, back to corsets, the contraptions have been around for thousands of years but became de rigueur for women around 1830-40, when waistlines returned to fashion. The high-waisted empire style was “in” during the regency period (fashion-wise approx.1800-1820), when short stays were sometimes used to support the bosom. A really racy gal in those days wore only a thin shift under her gown and dampened both, for full disclosure, if you will.

A camisole or comfy shift was worn under the corset, and a corset cover over the foundation (torture) garment. Corset covers were often beautifully embroidered. After that came a bustle (usually tied on), either over or under petticoats, then the dress or gown. That’s a lot of clothing, but men had their own layers to contend with, which included long underwear of cotton, linen or wool, a dress shirt closed with studs and cuff links, then braces (suspenders), next a stiff collar that was pinned or tied in place, the vest, and coat. Lack of a hat stamped a man as someone of lowly birth or in a state of partial undress. We’ve got a lot of near naked or underbred guys running around nowadays.

Before the guys start with superior snickers about women getting laced up, men also wore corsets, including the Prince Regent, who was lampooned as the Prince of Whales. It was sad enough when the BBC series (I think it was Blackadder) with Hugh Laurie potraying the prince as a scrawny, bumbling idiot, which history attests that Prince Florizel was not. The future George IV left as a legacy some mighty fine cultural works that nearly bankrupted England. Darn, I’ve digressed again.

The corset, more commonly known back then as stays, reached its zenith by the late nineteen hundreds. The fashionable lady boasted a wasp-waist, at the most sixteen inches, and I’ve read an account of thirteen inches. When autopsies started revealing horribly distorted innards, physicians spoke out against the garments, and the practice of tight-lacing started to fade in popularity. If you think women were nuts for buckling under to the fashion imperative of the day, just imagine what they would have thought about getting their faces injected with botox. Yeah, it’s all relative to the times.

The introduction of women in the work force during WWI changed women’s lives and attitudes forever. Stays were set aside for comfort’s sake. Women had always worked in factories; they just started to get uppity about it. Freedom from stays may have helped to free minds and ambitions.

When I was seven, my aunt opened her museum, The Old General Store. Also a fine seamstress, Aunt Marie dressed me up like a girl of the times in high-buttoned shoes and a dress she made with a sewed-in, modest bustle. There were more dresses as I grew older, and I always loved wearing them. The style felt so comfy, even during the heat of summer. I’ve seen many actresses in films wear period clothing without any sense of the time period, lifting the skirts on the sides to move or step up, and crossing their legs, which only harlots did to proclaim their slut-status. (Check out cigarette pictures from later1800’s.)

The finest portrayal and use of period costuming I’ve ever seen is Ingrid Bergman in Saratoga Trunk, from the Edna Ferber novel. (IMHO, the movie is far better than the book.) You can see the corset ridges under the exquisite gowns by Leah Rhodes, and Bergman moves and sits as women did in that era. It’s also fascinating to watch Bergman and Gary Cooper’s attraction for each other burn up the screen. It was rumored they were having a flaming affair during the filming, but that’s often said when a couple click in acting roles. The way Coop looks at her makes my heart go pitty-pat. Yee-ow. This time, I’m glad I digressed. I’m going to go watch it again.

Next time: Shut up! They Didn’t Do That in Vickie’s Time