Saturday, May 14, 2011

A Rink-Free Summer? Hardly!

With the prospect of Stitch away for six weeks, I was thinking that we'd get a hiatus from the Rink and its dramatics. I thought I'd get some cleaning done, relax a little, but mostly find something to do with myself.

Today was Game Day for Stitch's group class. We arrived, I put him in skates, and set him out. Then I took a walk to the Costume Room. The nice lady there greeted me, I introduced myself and said I was volunteering for the weekend.

"Can you sew?" she asked.
"I can work my way around a machine, yes," I didn't go into detail about the pocket welt mishap the previous evening.
"Any costuming experience?"
"In college and high school, yes, but I mostly do lighting. I was a Stage Manager, so I learned a bit of everything."

She then went into graphic detail about the work for the Winter Ice Show that needed to be done over the summer, and if I could help, it would be a godsend. I said sure, providing I didn't get much commission work which I wasn't anticipating. Needed something to do with myself, huh?

"Oh, I could never sell costumes for these people," she rolled her eyes. "I can't stand these moms."
I think my eyeballs fell out of my head, as she told me a gory tale of a Mom who was endlessly altering her son's outfit, making it worse and worse and worse, with the Mom becoming steadily more passive aggressive to the point of physically barring the Costume Lady from leaving until Mom listened to another round of alteration ideas.
"Wow, that's... amazing...." was my only reply.
"Oh, yeah. They can get awful. Some woman came in with this tacky fluorescent orange number for her soloist. Wouldn't listen to a word we said about colors looking different under spots, then got mad when it wasn't approved to be in the show."
"Lighting is an important part of it. What looks good as competition wear behaves differently under stage lighting." (Remember? Crap Blue Floodlights versus Direct Full Spectrum? Yup.)
"Oh! You get it! We have to trade information!"

I had to go to check in with Stitch, who was doing stupid relay games as usual. He was fine, playing with the other boys, who had all been grouped together for the relays. They came off the ice and I headed back in to give Costume Lady my numbers.

The Boy's costumes do not have helmets, praise Lidwina, but they are lacking in sparkle. Oh well, Pink Panther will be overdone because it's his first freestyle number. He will need an undershirt, because the top for their outfits is an athletic fabric, thin and holey. No problem.

The day isn't over yet. We have a run through to do, a Patch Test and I need to get to the Fabric Store. Busy, busy weekend.

2 comments:

  1. Now that you are an expert on costuming, you should put your knowledge of the show costuming process on the wiki.

    Men's costumes still aren't available. My wife's looks good though.

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  2. It's less of a process and more of a "See what we have and Alter it to fit our needs." And I'm no expert!

    ReplyDelete