Supervising Picasso

Next stop on my journey was Auburn University in Auburn Alabama (War Eagle! If you’re a fan). I was out of school and yet sort of back in school working with students who weren’t much younger than I. My position was as the Costume Shop Supervisor Intern. Basically I assigned tasks to students who came to work in the costume shop as part of their lab hours and supervised the tasks I gave them. This job was an interesting experience for me. Some of it good, some of it not so good. But that’s the way a lot of things are.

I had to learn how to prepare work and then manage a juggling act of supervision and getting things done. My mornings were student free, for me anyway. There was class 3 times a week, i think, in the mornings but my supervisor and the resident costume designer Tracy Oleinick was in charge of that. Mornings were my time to get things done. I used this time to figure out what needed to be done for shows, plan out the tasks the students would do in the afternoon, cut out any projects that the students could put together under supervision, and stitch whatever things were on my plate and beyond student ability. In the afternoons I spent most of my time assigning tasks, answering questions, and forgetting what I had been working on. I would pick something up and five minutes later remember that I had been working on something else before someone had come to me with a questions. Part of my job was also to attend dress rehearsals and take notes so that we could fix things the next day in the shop.

I wasn’t perfect at this job in the beginning. There was definitely a learning curve and I had never done anything like this before. My supervisor was also very particular and we weren’t always on the same page. But I just tried to keep up and fix whatever mistakes I made. I wasn’t always sure that my supervisor liked me but I imagine that many people feel this way when it comes to their bosses. In the end, I’m pretty sure she liked me because she wrote me a recommendation to grad school.

Back to the actual costumes though. Our first production was Picasso at the Lapin Agile. I made a few things for this and worked here and there on others while supervising other projects. One of my entire looks was Schmendiman. Or almost an entire look. He wore a jacket, vest, and jodhpurs. I had the jacket mostly stitched together when Tracy asked me why it wasn’t structured and then realized that I didn’t know how to tailor. Oops. She had simply given me a commercial pattern and asked me to put it together. The pattern instructions didn’t include tailoring and I had never made a tailored anything before. I followed the instructions. Time was short so she took over the jacket and added in hymo and all of the other tailoring elements and made it into a really nice jacket. I wish that there had been more time so that she could have taught me what she was doing but there wasn’t. This experience would prompt me into a personal project, but that’s another post. So I continued with the vest which was also from a commercial pattern and the jodhpurs which were a commercial pattern for a regular pair of pants. We had some aviation jodhpurs in stock and used them as reference to alter the shape of the commercial pattern. Here’s Schmendiman (unfortunately, I do not remember the actor’s name).

I also made the skirt for Suzanne. This skirt went together beautifully at first but proved to be a pain in rehearsals and production. The over skirt is a velvet burnout bagged out with another fabric to create a zigzag hem. The problem is that the velvet kept stretching out and becoming baggy at the bottom. We kept having to take the waistband off and pick up the velvet from the waist to fix it. You can still see some of the sagging in the picture. I think we probably should have let the cut pieces hang for a day or two before stitching it together. Lesson learned. Here’s Kristen Woods, now Kree Woods, as Suzanne.

The last significant thing that I did for this production was to set up and supervise the application of the trim on the Countess’s skirt. I put the skirt on a dress form and pinned the trim in place. This was done on the form instead of flat so that adjustments for aesthetically pleasing placement could be made. Sometimes it’s easier to view such things in 3D instead of flat. The trim was then hand stitched on. I did some of this and had students helping me with it. Here’s Laura Gail Smith as the Countess and a picture of the entire cast so you can see the costumes as a whole since this job for me wasn’t just about one or two costumes but the whole production. Costume design for this production is by Tracy Oleinck.

Also, just a fun fact. Many of the actors onstage, most in fact, are some of the wonderful students who I worked with in the afternoons. These students had some of the best attitudes about learning to sew and doing all of the not so fun tasks that get assigned to those with limited sewing skills in a costume shop. The students that I worked with were one of the “good things” about my job. They also may have sparked my initial interest in teaching, which I hope to do one day.