Drama Costumes I: The Process (Working #4)

Well, technically not "working," as I didn't get paid - but definitely work in that it took pretty well three months of steady and sometimes close to full-time effort!

So here's the story:

Last fall, on my first day of substitute teaching at St. Patrick's High School (just across the street) I met the amazing Emma Smith, drama teacher. Actually, the assistant principal introduced us pretty well immediately after he heard I could sew. Emma, in turn, put considerable faith in me by inviting me to take on a leading role in costume design and production for their February staging of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Most of us have heard of it - Broadway musical, Andrew Lloyd Webber, 1970s, and a perennial favorite with student groups. Well - I said yes. What fabric lover could resist a chance to design the actual "dreamcoat" for this production? certainly not I. Not that I had any clear idea of what I was getting into... for I worked on many of the other costumes as well, and it is certainly a very large cast! But I guess I'm a bit of a "go big or go home" kinda person, and don't necessarily shrink from a challenge.

Work began pretty well immediately on October 1. For my plan was not only to acquire fabric and design and sew costumes, but to dye most of the fabric as well - and that's where my fibre-friend and dye-master Donna MacDonald came in. Emma, bless her heart, agreed to our experiment. We put in an order to Dharma Trading Company for three bolts of fabric, and for much of October and all of November my dining room looked like this:

Some of the costumes were made with old drapes, piled on the chair below (before dyeing):

In late November and into December Donna and I spent four sessions dyeing the fabric out at the Guild of Arts and Crafts, with stunning results. In one of the courses Donna had taken in Ohio, she came away with a swatch book that allows her to achieve intended color with great accuracy. Still, the fun is always that different fabrics take the same dye very - and unpredictably - differently. The picture below shows her dye book, as well as rayon/linen fabric (large pieces for the wives caftans) each dyed together with silk chiffon (small pieces) and straight rayon (smallest pieces) - with sometimes startling results. For example, the green and orange (first pieces lower right) come from the same dye bath!

Dyeing is equal parts science and alchemy. Three pictures show a typical session at the Guild: 1) Donna the Dye Magician measuring and weighing; 2) the white board with the steps and the timing (when to stir and mix, when to add soda ash etc.); 3) the whole set up, with fabric pieces and buckets and charts etc. all organized:

Our dyeing proceeded from basic to tricky, i.e. the (cotton) drapes that made up the brothers' tunics through the (rayon/linen) caftans for their wives to the (rayon/silk) pieces that went into The Dreamcoat itself. I also sewed more blue, gold, and bronze lamée (known in the serious quilting world as "shiny sh**") than I ever want to see in my life again, the Egyptian scenes needing that kind of ostentatious pizazz. For much of January, therefore, my dining room table looked like this:

The show is currently on - Wednesday through Saturday evening, with an afternoon matinee on Saturday, and I've seen it twice already. I went on opening night for solidarity, and will go on closing night just to enjoy the achievement. Don't want to jinx things by showing the costumes themselves - that'll be the next posting, also because I'd like to be able to include a few pictures of the cast in their costumes. Suffice it at the moment to say that the kids did the costumes proud - I felt like a proud mother (more accurately: grandmother) and had tears in my eyes at their tremendous effort. Quite amazing, considering I hadn't set eyes on any of them three months ago.

The Ledge (Leg) Café (Working #3)

On the first of February I started a six-week stint of part-time work at the café in the Legislature building. A friend of my sister's runs it - "Putte" (whose official name is Dagmar Nielsen, and yes, she's a Danish immigrant) has had the contract for the past three years: she's to provide generally available noshings during the day as well as all the food that legislators require when they're hard at work deliberating territory finances and health care and devolution and such. And when the Ledge is in session, as it is during six weeks in February and the first half of March - goodness, a lot of food does get consumed!

So first a few pictures, then a few comments. First of all, I've said in previous posts that The Ledge is one of a number of beautiful buildings in Yellowknife, and well worth the tour should you come up to visit. I walk to work, and still get a little thrill every time I turn the corner and see it, now in the snow (the first picture closer up on a snowy day, the second in the distance on a sunny day):

My walk takes me through downtown Yellowknife and into the natural area on the picture above, where I take childish delight in using a shortcut to the Prince of Wales Museum by following snowmobile track across a little lake - walking on water after all, or perhaps Yellowknife's version of "look, Ma, no hands!":

Once in The Ledge I sign in at the security desk and get a pass, since my work sometimes require traversing areas off-limits to visitors. The desk is located inside "The Great Hall," as the central open area is called - here's The Great Hall, the security desk in the distance, and behind it the warm lights of the legislative library:

There is some beautiful art in the building, such as this sculpture in one corner of The Great Hall:

If I do a 180 degree turn from where I took the picture of The Great Hall, I see the approach to the café. It's a lovely spot (and yes, that's a bison head on the wall to the right of the door):

My main domain is the actual café area, where from 10 to 2 I am responsible for making food (mostly sandwiches augmented by a few daily specials) and doing the mechanics of selling. That means I now know how to work the credit/debit machine from the vendor side of the ledger (not rocket science, after all). Here the little kingdom for which I have responsibility:

The Great Hall is used for receptions, three of them last week, the opening week of session. That meant catering work for all of us - I peeled 58 hard-boiled eggs, for example, to make devilled egg hors-d'oeuvres. While in a past life I did of course prepare food for parties, sometimes large ones (over 40 people for Alan's wonderful 65th birthday, I recall), never in my life have I peeled 58 eggs in one sitting! I also put massive numbers of assorted squares on little white cupcake cups, flattened out - thinking all the while that though I have of course in my past life lifted such squares from trays, I never particularly thought about the person who must have spent several hours putting them there. A life lesson.

Putte has all this work well in hand, managing vast quantities of food and numerous litres of coffee. The first picture shows her in her tiny kitchen (two burners!), the second with her and co-worker Sheena in the café area putting some sort of special sandwich together.

 

Rounding out the team is the equally hard-working Ruth, here enjoying a rare free minute to grab a bite (often indeed only standing up):

I have asked myself, of course: just WHY am I doing this? Perhaps because I've always wanted to see what it is like to work in a café, and this is the perfect opportunity - six weeks only, and part-time. My conclusion: I am glad I don't have to do it for a living. For that is another reason, perhaps: a tiny expression of solidarity with those who have no recourse but to work in the service industry, especially immigrant women who have qualifications not recognized in Canada. A third reason: try out whether steadier work, a place to go to every day, would be good for me in other ways (my conclusion: not really; I do not want for connection in Yellowknife).

Part of me fluctuates between amusement and chagrin that I am making sandwiches and exchanging coffee urns for people doing things similar to what I used to do, in a previous life from which I voluntarily retired. I realized, however, that I don't miss my previous occupation as such - what I might miss, sometimes, is the prestige associated with it. How much more social approbation is earned by being able to say: I'm a professor! than: I work in the Ledge Café!

That being said, Yellowknife is really the perfect place to try something like that out. Many people here do many different things: a geologist friend who last year spent several months doing geology work in Greenland is a part-time coordinator for Ecology North, one sales clerk in the bookstore is taking a break from a law career, my brother-in-law stopped running a complex dairy operation and is quite happy with the machine-shop job he currently has. Reactions to my working in the Ledge Café have been invariably positive, even envious about the beauty of the location. And - after all - it's only six weeks. Put a check beside another item on the bucket list!