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You know, it has to be done by hand.
And so artisans who work in the theatre, like
we train here at Penn State, are valuable everywhere.
Our kids go right into the industry because we're teaching them
these skills that people need desperately, which is kind of wonderful.
This past summer
we didn't have a first year group of grad students and we decided
we weren't going to London for one year, so I had like one year that I could do this.
There was only once chance.
And so I started in August making inquiries of the university of Bournemouth, and I said,
"I have these skills and I've made a lot of hats, but we're doing a production of Titanic
and I would like to learn bigger hats, and things that
would be more of the period of 1910, which I've never done."
I brag about it all the time here because for two weeks I got to do one thing only.
and sit at a table for 10 hours a day making hats, and just
really concentrate on learning a new skill, which was really fantastic.
It's almost like they want to be born and have their own
ideas about what they want to be. Even hats that I start, they don't necessarily end up
being what I thought they were when I started when they finish.
They had these purple velvet flowers which I thought were really fabulous, so I thought, "ok,
I'm going to do something in the purple range." And then in one of the fabric stores in Shepherd's Bush I found
this fabulous black and purple stripe that became the
bow and the edging on this, and then we had to find another fabric and we thought this went like really
nicely with it.
My parents were both teachers, and so
I was that kid that was in the library that they'd say, "why don't you go out on the playground?"
And I was so happy in the world of books and whatever, and sometimes I'll get a job and
I literally skip to the library, cause like, oh my god, I'm going to go today and research
Vivien Leigh today, and I was like the happiest kid on the planet that day.
And so history is huge.
I have to be sort of knowledgeable about psychology, and relationships, and
history, and art history, and world history.
And you have to have kind of a knowledge of all of these things to understand
the period of what we're doing.
We have people in my department who make these beautiful silk dresses, these beautiful delicate things.
I'm much more like I get to roll up my sleeves and muscle this stuff into place,
fight it into place and put a wire in it, and make this really solid thing that will last through the run of a show.
I like that better, actually. I could make a dress, it wouldn't be pretty and there would be a
lot of cursing involved, but this I love.