Costumes

It's mrtl motif Monday and today's word is costumes.

I have to admit, I was never good at Halloween costumes. I'm always really creative, like the day or week after Halloween. So I'm going to take the word and stick it into another context.

Many of you don't know that I went to college to major in music. With an emphasis in Opera Theatre.

Yes, you heard it here first. I was/am an opera geek. I still love to sing. I get quite depressed nowadays since I'm not singing all of the time and my range has all but decreased by two octaves.

So, yes, back to the costumes. I have been "doing" theatre, musical theatre and choral works since I was teeny tiny. In the first play that I remember being in my costume was a big box wrapped up like a present. I was "Big Me". It was at our church, a Unitarian Church, and the play was all about ego and id and really deep stuff that a 5 year old just doesn't "get". All I "got" was that my lines were funny and people laughed and thought I was great. "Big Me" was the egotistical, attention hungry, selfish friend of "Little Me". (BTW - NOT a stretch for me to play at 5)

My favorite play I've ever done is when the theatre group I was working with at the time (I was just shy of 19) did an update of Jesus Christ Superstar. We had so much fun on this show. To this day, it's my favorite thing that I've ever done. We had a massively talented cast, for community theatre, and everyone got along really well. Which hardly ever happens in a cast. We updated it by setting it in present times. Jesus was a street preacher, Judas had a smack habit (and killed himself with an overdose at the end). Annas and Caiphas were televangelists who worked at a show called "Pray for Heaven" which, when the door slammed, the sign would lose its "R" and become "Pay for Heaven". Fitting, no? So anyway, I played Annas and I totally got madeover to look like Tammy Faye Baker - big spidery eyes and all.

As many of you have guessed, I grew up in Colorado Springs, which is where (and I'm seriously NOT making this up) God himself has called his "special" followers to gather to avoid the Armageddon (and not the movie with my future husband Ben Affleck). Needless to say, once word got out that we were first, performing the "blasphemous" Rock Opera and second that we were updating it to take potshots at evangelicals....well, lets just say we got protested. Every night. Every night, I'd walk into the theatre and get screamed at by a family of four, a fifty year old man, two really homely women (who I suspected were closet lesbians) and a myriad of other people carrying BIG Bibles. One of them actually came in to our dress rehearsal in order to "report back what filth we were portraying". The next day, opening night, our director pulled us together backstage to read the letter from this same lady. She basically said that she had come to be able to report the filth, what she found was that if Jesus were alive today, she thought the scenario would play out exactly as we had shown. She mentioned that she found herself closer to Christ after leaving our play, since she realized that Christ was about love - not money and not exclusion. It was a huge moment to realize that even community theatre had the ability to impact someone's life in a very profound way.

I haven't done any theatre in over 8 years. Obviously, with work and family obligations, I won't be doing any time soon. But I hope that someday I will. I miss the smell of a theatre, the way the lights blind you as you look toward the audience, the way that eighteen tons of makeup are required to be seen from the 25th row and beyond. And I do miss the costumes. Whether it's the wedding dress I wore as Maria in The Sound of Music or the bra and panties I wore as the girl who tries to turn Jeffrey back on to women or the school girl uniform I wore as Mary in The Children's Hour. I even miss the scratchy long wig I wore for Laura in The Glass Menagerie. Someday, my child will be gone and my house will be quiet and my husband will be golfing and you'll know where you can find me.